his life on the precarious issue of a Russian invasion.1 The expulsion of the French from the Peninsula, the catastrophe of Moscow, the resurrection of Europe, were on the eve of commencing, when the continued fidelity of England to the cause of freedom hung on the doubtful balance of household appointments! CHAP. 1812. which 46. followed if obtained If a change of ministry had taken place at that time, the destinies of the world would probably have been Results changed. The Whigs, fettered by their continued pro- would have testations against the war, could not, with any regard to the Whigs consistency, have prosecuted it with vigour. Their had then unvarying prophecies of disaster from the Peninsular office. contest would have paralysed all the national efforts in support of Wellington; their continued declamations on the necessity of peace would have led them to embrace the first opportunity of coming to an accommodation with Napoleon. Alexander, mindful of their refusal of succour after the battle of Eylau, would have been shaken in his resolution after the battle of Borodino. Sweden, unsupported by English subsidies, would not have ventured to swerve from the French alliance. The occupation of Moscow would have led to a submission destructive of the liberties of Europe; or the retreat, unthreatened, from the north, would have been spared half its horrors; at latest, peace would have been concluded with the French Emperor at Prague. Wellington would have been withdrawn with barren laurels from the Peninsula; Europe had been yet groaning under the yoke of military power, and the dynasty of Napoleon still upon the throne. In contemplating the intimate connexion of such marvellous results with the apparently trivial question of household appointments in the royal palace of Great Britain, the reflecting observer, according to the temper of his mind, will indulge in the vein of pleasantry or the sentiment of thankfulness. The disciples of Voltaire, recollecting how a similar court intrigue arrested the course of Marlborough's victories in one age, and prolonged the popular LXIV. 1812. CHAP. rule in Great Britain in another, will inveigh against the subjection of human affairs to the direction of chance, the caprice of sovereigns, or the arts of courtiers; while the Christian philosopher, impressed with the direction of all earthly things by an Almighty hand, will discern in these apparently trivial events the unobserved springs of Supreme Intelligence; and conclude, that as much as royal partialities may be the unconscious instruments of reward to an upright and strenuous, they may be the ministers of retribution to a selfish and corrupted 47. George the age. George IV., who, probably from personal rather than Character of public considerations, was led to take this important step Fourth. in the outset of his government, had the good fortune to wield the sceptre of Great Britain during the most glorious era in its long and memorable annals; and yet no sovereign ever owed so little to his own individual wisdom or exertions. The triumphs which have rendered his age immortal were prepared by other hands, and matured in a severer discipline. It was his good fortune to succeed to the throne at a time when the seeds sown by the wisdom of preceding statesmen, the valour of former warriors, and the steadiness of the last monarch, were beginning to come to maturity; and thus he reaped the harvest prepared, in great part, by the labours of others. Yet justice must assign him a considerable place in the august temple of glory completed during his reign. If the foundation had been laid, and the structure was far advanced, when he was called to its direction, he had the merit of putting the last hand to the immortal fabric. To the vast and unprecedented exertions made by Great Britain towards the close of the contest, he gave his cordial concurrence; he resisted the seducing offers of peace when they could have led only to an armed neutrality; and, by his steady adherence to the principles of the Grand Alliance, he contributed in no slight degree to keep together its discordant elements, when they were LXIV. 1812. ready to fall to pieces amidst the occasional disasters and CHAP. frequent jealousies of the last years of the war. The unprecedented triumphs with which it concluded, and the profound peace which has since followed, left little room for external exploits during the remainder of his reign; and the monarch was of too indolent a disposition, though not of too limited a range of intellectual vision, to influence those momentous internal changes which ensued, or take any part either in advancing or retarding the vast revolution of general thought which succeeded to the excitement and animation of the war. Yet history must at least award to him the negative merit of having done nothing to accelerate the changes which grew up with such extraordinary rapidity during that period, so fertile in intellectual innovation; of having been the last man in his dominions who yielded to that momentous alteration in their religious institutions which first loosened the solid fabric of the British empire; and of having left to his successors the constitution, at a period when it was seriously menaced by domestic distress and general excitement, unimpaired either by tyrannic encroachment or democratic innovation. 48. and charac If, from the comparatively blameless and glorious picture of George IV.'s public administration, we turn to His private the details of his private life, and the features of his indi- disposition vidual character, we shall find less to approve and more ter. to condemu. Yet even there some alleviating circumstances may be found; and the British nation, in the calamities which hereafter may ensue from a failure of the direct line of succession, can discern only the natural result of the restrictions, equally impolitic and unjust, which it has imposed, in their dearest concerns, on the feelings of its sovereigns. His talents were of no ordinary kind, and superior to those of any of the family. It is impossible to see the busts of the sons of George III. in Chantrey's gallery, without being at once convinced that the Prince of Wales had the most intellectual head LXIV. 1812. CHAP. of the group.* None could excel, few equal, his talents in conversation, or the ability with which he sustained it with the ablest and most intellectual men of the day. His tastes were cultivated; he had a high admiration for the great works of painting; his ear in music was exquisite; and although his passion in architecture was rather for the splendour of internal decoration than the majesty of external effect, yet the stately halls of Windsor will long remain an enduring monument of his patronage of art in its highest branches. The jealousy which generally exists between the ruling sovereign and the heir-apparent early brought him into close connexion with the leaders of the Whig party; and for nearly fifteen years Carlton House was the grand rendezvous of all the statesmen, wits, and beauties, whom jealousy of the reigning power had thrown into the arms of the Opposition. 49. His great manners, of expres This circumstance had a material influence on his future character. Accustomed from his earliest youth to elegance of the society, not merely of the most elegant but the most and felicity intellectual men of his age; the companion, not less than sion. the friend, of Burke and Fox, of Grey and Sheridan, he soon acquired that skill and delicacy in conversation which such intercourse alone can communicate, and shone with the reflected light which so often, when presented by those habituated to such society, dazzles the inexperienced beholder, and supplies, at least during the hours of social intercourse, the want of original thought or solid acquirements. Yet his talents were not entirely acquired from the brilliant circle by which he was surrounded. His perceptions were quick; his abilities, when fairly * This is decisively established by the testimony of no ordinary observer, and certainly no partial judge. "It may give you pleasure," said Lord Byron to Sir Walter Scott, "to hear that the Prince Regent's eulogium on you to me was conveyed in language which would only suffer by my attempting to transcribe it; and with a tone and taste which gave me a very high idea of his abilities and accomplishments, which I had hitherto considered as confined to manners, certainly superior to those of any living gentleman."-LORD BYRON to SIR WALTER SCOTT, July 6, 1812; LOCKHART's Life of Scott, ii. 402. LXIV. 1812. roused either by the animation of conversation or the CHAP. lustre of external events, of a very high order; and many of his holograph letters are a model of occasional felicity both in thought and expression. His features were handsome; his figure, in youth, graceful and commanding; and both then, and when it was injured in maturer years by the hereditary corpulence of his family, his manners were so perfectly finished, that he was universally admitted to deserve the title which he acquired that of the first gentleman in Europe. 50. and faults. But with these no inconsiderable qualities, it is true, in a sovereign-the meed of praise due to his memory is His frailties exhausted, and there remains nothing but to do justice to the faults, and draw no screen over the many frailties, of his character. Thrown from the outset of life into the vortex of dissipation, without the necessity for exertion, which, in an humbler rank, or on a despotic throne, so often counteracts its pernicious effects, he soon became an ardent votary of pleasure; and without descending to the degrading habits to which that propensity often leads, he only rendered its sway on this account the more tyrannical and destructive to his character. Profuse, extravagant, and unreflecting, he not only was throughout his whole life, before he mounted the throne, drowned in debt, but the systematic pursuit of refined enjoyment involved him in many discreditable and unfeeling, and some dishonourable acts. Dissipation and profligacy in youth, indeed, are so usual in princes, and arise so readily from the society with which they are surrounded, that * The following holograph note, from the Prince Regent to the Duke of Wellington, accompanied the appointment of the latter as Field-Marshal after the battle of Vitoria :-" Your glorious conduct is above all human praise, and far above any reward. I know no language the world affords worthy to express it. I feel I have nothing left to say, but devoutly to offer up my prayer of gratitude to Providence that it has, in its omnipotent bounty, blessed my country and myself with such a general. You have sent me, among the trophies of your unrivalled fame, the staff of a French marshal, and I send you in return that of England."-The PRINCE REGENT to WELLINGTON, 3d July 1813.-GURWOOD, X. 532. |