own interests were intimately connected. To this rare and important knowledge he added a sweetness and an amenity of temper which extorted the praises even of his political opponents. But he, too, was the steady supporter of civil and religious liberty; and he, too, was so detested by George III. that the King, with his own hand, struck his name out of the list of Privy Councillors, and declared that he would rather abdicate the throne than admit him to a share in the Government.' * There is no doubt evidence enough to the following effect : that the King did, in popular parlance, 'hate' Lord Chatham, though much rather with a kind of petulant aversion, than with a'savage rancour,' or a feeling approaching to insanity. But the arraignment against him on this subject is chiefly founded on one of his familiar notes to Lord North, printed by Lord Brougham, under the date of the 9th August, 1775. So much use has lately been made of these notes as illustrating the royal character, that it is as well the reader should be reminded, once for all, what they really are. Lord Stanhope tells us that they 'were laid before Sir James Mackintosh, who, extracting the most important passages, transcribed them into a MS. volume.' We believe we may add that the originals are lost. What we have, therefore, are not the King's notes, but simply Sir J. Mackintosh's hurried extracts; and how far he may have curtailed and adapted them (using them in all honesty for his own purpose only) it is impossible for us to say. Some of them bear internal evidence of being the mere abstracts of the transcriber. Taken as genuine, they are mere scraps written down in all the confidence of friendship, and all the freedom of ordinary conversation, and of precisely the same value, and subject to the same deductions, as records of hasty conversation between intimate friends would be, when referred to as expressions of permanent opinion. 'The making Lord Chatham's family suffer for the conduct of their father is not in the least agreeable to my sentiments. But I should choose to know him to be totally unfit to appear on the public stage, before I agree to any offer of that kind, lest it should be wrongly construed to fear of him. . . But when decrepitude or death puts an end to him as a trumpet of sedition, I shall make no difficulty in placing the second son's name instead of the father's, and making the pension 30007.' As to this threat, Mr. Buckle is, we believe, in the right; but there is singular variation in the accounts left by contemporaries, as to the time and circumstances of this supposed resolution of the King. We are inclined from the evidence to believe he seriously entertained it twice: once on the occasion of the Lord George Gordon riots, when he is said to have been turned from it by the remonstrances of M. de Luc, who at that time had much of his confidence; again in the following year, when obliged to part with Lord North. Strong Strong language, doubtless; but before we condemn the King for using it, let us examine a little into the relations between himself and Lord Chatham. To those who, like Mr. Buckle, believe that George III. hated Lord Chatham because he was a 6 champion of popular rights,' of course the circumstance is at once satisfactorily accounted for. There may be those who will care to search a little below the surface. They will find that, whatever Mr. Pitt's merits towards his country may have been, his personal conduct to George III. had been for several years of the most annoying kind. They will find the great patriot, in the King's closet and in Parliament, oscillating between the most presumptuous arrogance, capricious exclusiveness, and a sycophancy almost unintelligible to modern English ears. They will find that in close communion with his Sovereign, Chatham strangely combined all the fulsome prostration of Queen Elizabeth's courtiers, with all the dictatorial pride of the minister of a citizen king. They will find that, whenever a great crisis required his powers, he was either at Hayes 'lying on his back, talking fustian,' or else in sinister activity, intriguing in turn with every section of the factions which disputed the power and patronage of St. James's-alike indispensable and intolerable. Distance of time, and the lustre which envelopes his name, have now softened the harsher outlines of the great statesman's character; but a very slight familiarity with the minuter records of the period is enough to show us how insufferable a nuisance he must have been to those who had the misfortune to oppose him, or the greater misfortune to cooperate with him; but most of all to the poor King, alternately cajoled and snubbed by his too powerful subject, elevated to a deity one day, degraded (literally) to the meanest of mankind the next, and exposed to language which it was almost equally dangerous to the royal authority to notice and to leave unnoticed. But it is too true that they will find får stronger cause than all this for the King's aversion; that, in plain English, the great statesman was one on whose assurances no reliance could be placed, whose vehemence was controlled by no regard for veracity. There were two passages in Lord Chatham's later life which seem to us to have especially warped the King's inclinations against him. The King's detestation of Wilkes, from whom he had suffered so much, was notorious, and surely justifiable. On the 16th November, 1763, Mr. Pitt, in Parliament, thus qualified Wilkes as the author of the Essay on Woman:'-' He did not deserve to be classed among the human species. He was the blasphemer * See Pitt's famous Speech of March, 1770. of his God, and the libeller of his King.' The orator then proceeded to reconcile this abuse of Wilkes with his own (at that time) close alliance with his brother-in-law Lord Temple, Wilkes's notorious patron :· 'He was proud to call him (Lord Temple) his relation. He was his friend, his bosom friend, whose fidelity was as unshaken as his virtue. They went into office together, and would die together. He knew nothing of any connexion with the writer of the libel. If there subsisted any, he was totally unacquainted with it.' On this speech the King congratulated Mr. Grenville; and Lord Barrington described it as worth 50,000l. to the ministry, for it would secure them a good session.' We know better now; and the King, doubtless, was soon well enough informed of the real value of Pitt's Demosthenic repudiation of connexion with the libeller. Thanks to the precautions taken by Lord Temple to preserve the evidence of his own infamy, we are now able to read in the Grenville Papers the amount and character of that nobleman's connexion with Wilkes at the date of Pitt's speech. In the preceding month of October we find his Lordship addressing Wilkes in half-a-dozen flattering couplets, beginning 'What Muse thy glory shall presume to sing, On the 18th Mr. Wilkes informs his poetical correspondent that he is proud to have obligations to Lord Temple,' and 'takes the liberty of going into his private affairs,' explains the circumstances of Mrs. Wilkes's jointure and his own Buckinghamshire estates, and wishes to raise the sum of 30007. to be entirely happy,' through the medium of his Lordship's purse. On the 12th of November, four days before Pitt's speech, we find Wilkes closeted with Lord Temple for two hours and a half.' On the 13th Wilkes 'visits his Lordship' again. And are we to believe-or are we to suppose the King believed, except for the first moment-in Pitt's asseverations of his own ignorance of his brother-in-law's ostentatious patronage of the libeller? Why, the supposition is too strong even for Dr. Thackeray, model biographer as he is. 'According to Mr. Wilkes,' says that gentle writer, the conduct of Mr. Pitt, in making these strong declarations, was hypocritical towards the public and deceitful towards himself.' It is clear enough in short, that as soon as the echoes of the orator's eloquence had died away, his denial was totally discredited, and by none more than the King, to propitiate whose favour it had been chiefly uttered. Can we be surprised at the temper into which his feelings towards the utterer finally settled? Years, Years, however, passed on, new combinations and new cabinets were formed, and Mr. Pitt, alternately domineering and sycophantic, certainly did not improve his position in the King's good graces, whatever subjection the latter may have been forced occasionally to endure beneath him. The extraordinarily servile character of Pitt's language on receiving the pension and peerage has been often remarked on. Here is another specimen of the kind of diction in which it was his pleasure to accost his Sovereign, in the intervals of flagrant opposition to him. It is the draft of a letter to the King, from the Chatham Correspondence,' vol. iii., p. 230 (March, 1767): 'Lord Chatham most humbly begs leave to lay himself at the King's feet, and wants words to convey to his Majesty his duty, submission, and devotion, and how deeply he is penetrated with the exceeding condescension and transcendent goodness of his Majesty. The appearance of returning reason in the House of Commons is solely owing to his Majesty's magnanimity and wisdom, in the present crisis! ... He counts every hour till he is able to attend his Majesty's gracious presence.' per A few years more, and the stilted courtier was addressing the House of Lords in the famous speech, already referred to, in which he asserted that his Majesty was still under the influence of Lord Bute--that favourite, at the present moment abroad, yet his influence by his confidential agents as powerful as if he were at home. Who does not know the Mazarinade of France? that Mazarin absent was Mazarin still—and what is there to distinguish the two cases? A long train of these practices,' was his famous peroration, has at length unwillingly convinced me that there is something behind the throne, greater than the throne itself.' This was said at a time when the King had not seen Lord Bute for six years, and when Lord Chatham must have been fectly well aware that he had not done so. It may be, as the Duke of Grafton then asserted, and as Lord Stanhope believes, that this most calumnious charge originated in the cause so lavishly assigned to the King's own acts by his enemies- the effect of Chatham's distempered mind, brooding over its discontents.' But what must have been its effect on the mind of the King? That charge of favouritism towards Lord Bute-scarcely founded at all on the outset, wholly unfounded since 1763-had embittered his life. It had blasted those early prospects of popularity with the nation which he had cherished in all the freshness of a youthful and eager nature. It had caused his people to regard him with hatred, his nobility to treat him with cold suspicion. It had driven his ministers into abandoning the Princess Dowager to a public mark of disgrace, which the nation had at last the decency to to repudiate, but which made a deep impression on her sensitive son. It had driven that mother to implore from him a protection against insult which it was impossible for him to give, until he was forced to reply, in the stern language reported by Horace Walpole in his Last Journals, 'I bear such things, and she must bear them. It had caused the mob to huzza, in defiance of the common decencies of human nature, at the death of her whom they had persecuted in life. Grossly false as the charge was (as is now admitted on all hands), it was of that class of falsehood which proverbially admits no refutation: for a negative cannot be proved. It had been the very curse of the King's life: a malignant shadow, fastening itself to him with all the tenacity of substance. And now, in 1770, when time and good sense were at last gradually consigning these rumours to oblivion, the foremost man in the country stepped forward, clothing gratuitous falsehood in all the colours of his unrivalled eloquence, to give them renewed life, and for the mere personal purposes of faction! And then the refined malignity of the allusion to Mazarin, so well understood by that generation! And this was one who so shortly before had thrown himself at the Royal feet, profuse in expressions of the most slavish devotion! Surely there is no reason to wonder at the durability of the King's displeasure, or that the mouth which, always using when in opposition, as Mr. Massey admits, language highly aggressive and inflammatory,' had at last given utterance to this mischievous calumny, was stigmatised by him in private correspondence with his minister as a 'trumpet of sedition.' . It is in no spirit of disrespect to the memory of Chatham that we dwell on his worst failings: as far as he is himself concerned, his mighty shade ought to stand on the other side of that river of Lethe which washes away memories of evil; but common justice towards the King demands that, when his treatment of that great citizen is made the ground of severe animadversion, history should not forget the provocation he received. It is a melancholy proof of the abasement to which extravagance may reduce genius, when we discover a mind so inferior as that of George III. entertaining, and with cause, a sentiment of aversion not unmingled with contempt for one like Lord Chatham's. But his was genius notwithstanding: and men are apt very imperfectly to realize their own meaning when we attribute that quality to any one, whether author or statesman. We thereby mark him out as differing from the rest of his race, not in degree, but in species. 'The fire of some orators,' as Lord John Russell forcibly expresses it in his Life of Fox, 'is more skilfully prepared their flame burns longer and more steadily; but Lord Chatham's |