Policy and Character of the Two Late Reigns.

Having dwelt so long on the pecuniary affairs of the late reigns, our readers will, perhaps, have patience with us while we submit a few strictures on their political and social bearing.

The personal character of George III., and the predominant maxims of his reign, are too well known to require elucidation in this place; but one part of his policy has either not obtained the attention it deserves, or is not so generally understood. It is thought this prince, like his predecessor, was held in thraldom by the boroughmongers: this is an error. Although the intellectual endowments of the king were not of a high order, he is entitled to the praise of being the first of his race who, if he did not emancipate himself from, at least lightened, the yoke imposed on the executive by the aristocracy.

The great families who had mainly contributed to the Revolution of 1688 claimed, for their services, an exclusive right to the government of the kingdom; having averted the despotism of the Stuarts, they sought to establish a despotism in themselves, and transmit the divine right of power, wrested from the monarch, to their own posterity. Parliamentary reform had not been agitated; and the people being of little political importance, the sovereign was the only obstacle to this oligarchical pretension. Hence their intrigues and encroachments were exclusively directed against the Crown. They sought to render the regal office a mere name; the king a puppet, to be moved by wires, of which they held the strings, to be brought out, like the unfortunate Montezuma, on show days, decked out in the habiliments of royalty, to inspire the multitude with respect for authority. William III. groaned under this system; Queen Anne patronized its opponents; the first and second George, having little knowledge of our institutions, and by nature not much qualified for the exercise of authority, submitted to it quietly; but to the credit of George III., he openly rebelled against aristocratic usurpation. The king perceived, and his mother, the princess-dowager, in concert with lord Bute, demonstrated to him the galling bondage in which his predecessors had been held by the arrogance of the Devonshire, the Pelham, the Portland, and other towering families. “George,” said the princess, “be King;” and the prince obeyed her constant exhortation, and became so not only in name but reality. The design was laudable, and even constitutional; the king his prerogatives, and the people their representatives, being the whole creed of reformers. But it was only the first, not the second, the king regarded; while grasping at the prerogatives of the Stuarts, he was equally averse to the rights of the Commons.

Lord Bute was appointed the first minister on the new system. Being a man of little capacity, ignorant of public affairs, and the management of parties, he was compelled to retire. But the king did not abandon his object. Partly by the untractableness of his own character, partly by the adroitness with which he played the factions against each other, but most of all from the immense increase in the power of the Crown, from taxation, the augmentation of the peerage, the establishment of the banking interest—aided with the money-jobbers, contractors, and speculators, he succeeded in breaking the aristocratic fetters. His independence may be dated from the American war. That contest was purely his own. It is even said he first suggested the stamp-duty. So much, however, was it considered the king’s personal quarrel, that those who did not concur in it were branded as disloyal.

The last attempt of the aristocracy to reduce the king to a state of pupilage was made in 1783, by the famous India Bill of Mr. Fox. This great measure, framed by Mr. Burke, was intended to establish a counterpoise to the influence of the Crown, by vesting the patronage of India in fifteen individuals chosen by parliament; in other words, by the coalition administration. Nothing could have been devised more effectual for the purpose; for it would have placed the sovereign of England at the mercy of the sovereigns of Bengal, and erected a mound from which the palace of St. James’s might always be maintained in dutiful and respectful obedience. But the king penetrated the snare that was laid for him; and, by a vigorous exertion of court influence and the artful excitement of popular clamour, the bill was thrown out, and the Whigs, driven from power in disgrace, sunk into complete insignificance. Their union with lord North exposed to the country the profligacy and rottenness of their public principles. It was the death-blow to party. “From the moment,” says the bishop of Llandaff, “the coalition was formed betwixt lord North and the men who for many years had reprobated in the strongest terms his political principles, I lost all confidence in public men. I clearly saw that they sacrificed their public principles to private pique, and their honour to their ambition.” The observations of Sir N. Wraxall are to the same purport. Mr. Nicholls, in his “Recollections,” says, “from the death of lord Rockingham they became a faction, and their efforts were no longer employed for the attainment of any great public object.” These writers speak from contemporary impression, and consequently represent the general feeling excited by their conduct.

The subsequent history of this party is too fresh in public recollection to require illustration. There are some Whigs yet, as there are some Jacobites, Bourbonites, and Johannites; for sects and parties hardly ever become extinct, however absurd their dogmas. But upon the whole, both Whiggism and Toryism may be considered defunct superstitions; and the impostures having been unmasked, men are now only shocked at the grossness of the idolatary by which they had been so long enslaved.

Upon the conduct of the Whigs, in their endeavours to controul the executive, one or two observations may be made. That the influence of the Crown, after its enormous augmentation during the American war, required abridgement, there can be no question; but the means employed for this purpose were highly objectionable. The Whigs attempted to throw the weight into the wrong scale; they saw the preponderance of the Crown, but were insensible or indifferent to the humiliation of the People: they looked only to themselves, and instead of raising the popular branch of the constitution, sought only their own aggrandizement, and, by providing sinecures and places for their adherents, balancing the patronage of the monarch. Hence the real friends of the people viewed their policy not only with contempt but abhorrence; for it contained no invitation to popular support—no guarantee for public liberty, and was merely the selfishness of party struggling for the influence and emoluments of regality.

Yet the Whigs have complained of ingratitude, of the people having been deluded from their “Natural Leaders!” But is not this a faithful history of their conduct? Is it not notorious, from the Revolution to the end of the last reign, the people had no alternative, save despotism in the sovereign, or despotism in an oligarchy? Is it surprising that they revolted from both these propositions; that they repulsed with equal scorn the open partizans of absolute power, and those who, under hollow and hypocritical professions, sought to inveigle them out of their liberties, or render them the passive instruments of personal ambition? From such “natural leaders” it was time the people separated, and established a party for themselves. That the secession was at length accomplished, may be ascribed to the persevering and patriotic efforts of sir Francis Burdett and the electors of Westminster, who were the first successfully to erect the standard of revolt from aristocratical domination.

These strictures on the aristocratical factions, it is needless to remark, apply only to their public conduct during the period under review. Both Tories and Whigs have recently undergone a change for the better; the administration of lord Wellington was better than any preceding administration formed from the same class of politicians: many Tories avow sentiments which their predecessors would have repudiated with horror; and the existing Whig ministry we feel confident, from all we can observe up to the moment we are writing, (December 22d, 1831,) is sincerely bent on reforming the popular branches of our institutions, on reducing the government expenditure, and on improving—if that be possible—the condition of the great body of the people of the United Kingdom. The fact is, there has been a progression (sir C. Wetherell would say, a retrocession) of parties; the more liberal Tories have adopted the sentiments of the Whigs, and the Whigs have adopted the sentiments of the more intelligent Radicals. But to what is the change to be ascribed? Why solely to events—events too obvious to be here enumerated. Had the people remained quiescent, the Whigs would have continued Whigs still, and the Tories would have been unchanged. But the people have become enlightened from experience of the evils inflicted by bad government; they have tasted of the forbidden fruit of knowledge—of that fruit which many would gladly have kept out of their reach; they have, in short, read the Black Book, and the consequence is, they no longer continue the duped spectators of the tracasseries of faction; they will no longer suffer the legislature of a great empire, instituted solely for their service and benefit, to be merely an arena for aristocratic contention, intrigue, and selfish ambition; they care nothing about men—who is in or who is out, but insist on the adoption of measures advantageous to themselves—and these measures are an efficient reform of an insulting mock representation—of an oppressive church—of an absurd and plundering legal system—of monopolies and taxes partial and unjust. More of these subjects hereafter; at present let us return to our task, from which we have deviated in order to escape for a moment the tedium of statistical detail.

The great theme of the panegyrists of George III. is his private virtues. For a king to discharge his duty to the people, it is not sufficient that he is neither passionately addicted to wine, nor women, nor gaming, and that he does not amuse himself occasionally, after the fashion of the East, by cutting off the heads of his lieges. Betwixt private men and those who fill important public stations there is a wide difference. The former may live and die as it has pleased Heaven to make them, and society has no right to complain, provided they observe the laws, and neither burthen the parish nor their friends. But the condition of a king is widely different: he has no privilege to be inept; he is the retained servant of the community, who has grave duties to discharge, and, his fees being enormous, it is not sufficient he is harmless and inoffensive, he ought to be actively beneficial. To judge of the blessings accruing from the reign of George III. it would be sufficient to contrast the state of the country when he ascended the throne with the condition to which it was reduced when his intellectual twilight subsided into total darkness. It is hardly possible to imagine how any career could have been more reckless, profligate, and regardless of ultimate consequences than that which entailed the paper currency, the monstrous debt, the poor-rates, and a vastly increased population dependent for subsistence on the uncertain demands of commerce and manufactures. Private virtues are a poor set-off against national calamities, especially if produced by inveterate obstinacy and error, as was unquestionably the case with the two great ruinous wars—those against America and France—in which George III. was engaged. Although the mental endowments of the king were very moderate, and he possessed no strength or originality of mind to carry him beyond the notions of religion and politics impressed during his education, yet, like others of the same intellectual grade, he had a quick sense of whatever tended to interfere with his own interests. He fully comprehended the effect likely to be operated on the status of his order by the French revolution. When that mighty movement began to manifest itself, he put (says Mr. Nicholls) Burke’s incendiary publication into the hands of every one he met. He said to every courtier who approached him, “If a stop is not put to French principles there will not be a king left in Europe in a few years.” In fact, he was the greatest alarmist in his dominions. Mr. Burke and the duke of Portland were only second and third to him. Mr. Pitt was averse to the war, but acquiesced from that truckling love of place, which was the prominent feature of his own character and that of most of his adherents. In like manner the Grenville Whig administration consented to abandon Catholic Emancipation, on the condition of royal service. But the renunciation was not sufficiently explicit to satisfy the jealous scruples of the king.

To conclude, George III. was not a tool of the boroughmongers, but a leading and active partner in the Oligarchy. He left the Crown to his successor in more complete sovereignty—more independent of aristocratic influence—disputed title—favouritism, or any other control, than it had been held since the conquest. His reign (as Bishop Watson observes) “was the triumph of Toryism. The Whigs had power for a moment—they quarrelled amongst themselves, and thereby lost the king’s confidence, lost the people’s confidence, and lost their power for ever; or, to speak more philosophically, there was neither Whigism nor Toryism left; excess of riches and excess of taxes, combined with excess of luxury, had introduced universal selfism.”

As we consider the next reign nothing more than an elongation of that of George III.—the government being conducted on precisely the same principles and maxims—we shall be very brief in our notice of it.

George the Fourth always appeared to us nothing more than a man of pleasure, whom the accident of birth had made a king. His means of indulgence were ample, and he did not spare them. At first he affected Whigism; but this might arise from his favourite companions in horse-racing, drinking, and intriguing being of that persuasion. Still he appears to have been one of the orthodox sort; for, like the party generally, he only adhered to his Whig principles while out of place, and became a Tory on his accession to power. But the politics of princes and poets are seldom worth investigating; whatever a King of England may profess while heir-apparent, or whatever popular principles may be held by a Whig lord while out of office, the only principles compatible with the borough system, and on which they can act on the assumption of power, are those of Toryism—that is corruption and intimidation; and this is no new discovery, since Mr. Pitt declared, almost fifty years ago, that no honest man could carry on the government without a reformed parliament.

In the choice of his ministers, as in other things, the king considered his personal ease. At the commencement of the Regency, a slight effort was made to bring into the administration his early friends; but, finding them fastidious, pragmatical, and disposed to meddle in his household establishment, the design was abandoned, and never again seriously resumed. Castlereagh, Canning, Huskisson, and Sidmouth were the most appropriate servants for a voluptuous monarch. These men held no principles that could interfere with his most lavish desires; their objects were limited to the enjoyment of power and its emoluments: how little they cared about the general weal may be instanced in the fact that, though they managed the affairs of the empire during a long period of profound peace, they never set about reforming the most glaring and admitted abuses in its public administration, not even endeavouring to reform the currency, economize the expenditure, reduce the debt, improve the laws, nor the commercial system, for even that originated in another quarter. Their object was only to carry on the government and enjoy the spoil, and this they were ready to do by the aid of any shallow and temporary expedient, totally regardless of the ultimate loss and misery it might entail upon the country. There is one event connected with Canning deserving of notice, since it evinced both discernment and firmness of mind in the sovereign. When the poor drivelling statesmen, Eldon, Bathurst, and Melville—the Polignacs and Peyronnets of the cabinet—refused to act with Mr. Canning as First Lord of the Treasury, as much, we believe, from personal jealousy as aversion to his more liberal ideas, the king stood manfully and magnanimously by his minister; and it is due to some of the Whigs to say, that they did not refuse their aid in the moment of peril. Mr. Canning was the best of his set, but not to be greatly admired for his patriotism: he was clever and accomplished, but a political adventurer merely, whose polar star was his own aggrandizement; had he lived, he would not, we apprehend, have been long premier, and, before his death, he evinced symptoms that showed he would prove neither a very useful nor very profound statesman.

It is not our intention to enter into any personal history or delineation of George IV.; for, in truth, we have nothing to communicate on these points but what is known to all the world. He always appeared to us to afford a striking confirmation of Lavater’s theory—his physiognomy and conduct being in such admirable keeping. Some have imagined a resemblance between him and the Emperor Tiberius. Both disappointed the expectations formed of them previous to their accession to power. One lived secluded from the sight of his subjects at the island of Capri; the other at Windsor. Women, wine, and mere sensual indulgence formed their chief employment and amusement. Neither of them knew how to forgive, and both were implacable in personal resentments. The persecution, by the King, of the unfortunate Caroline, and all who supported her, was mean, ungenerous, and unrelenting. His love of dress and etiquette was coxcomical, and detracted from the regal dignity. His love of seclusion is not difficult to explain: George IV. was a spoiled child, who, through life, had been accustomed only to do what ministered to his own gratification. In his latter days, neither his vanity nor desires were likely to be flattered by a frequent appearance in public; age had deteriorated his charms and enfeebled his powers, and to mingle among the “high-born dames” of the aristocracy, to select an object to whom to cast the royal handkerchief, was not among his urgent necessities.

To conclude: “God is just in all his ways!” George IV., Lord Castlereagh, Mr. Canning, and Mr. Huskisson are all gathered to their fathers, and will soon be forgotten. They lived for themselves, and the public will not cherish any lasting or grateful remembrance of their memories. The monarch expired on a chaise percée—what a death-bed for an “exquisite!” Lord Castlereagh perished by his own hands. Mr. Canning, after indulging in some unseasonable jokes on the infirmities of poor Ogden—of which no doubt he repented—died of internal inflammation. Mr. Huskisson’s death was deplorable. But what ought we to learn from these catastrophes?—Neither to envy the great, nor refuse sympathy to the unfortunate!