chap. X.} 1756. |
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of the princess dowager, and was the instructor
of the future sovereign of England in the theory of the British constitution.1 On the organization of his household, Prince George desired to have him about his person.
The request of the prince, which Pitt advocated, was resisted by Newcastle and by Hardwicke.
To embroil the royal family, the latter did not hesitate to blast the reputation of the mother of the heir apparent by tales of scandal,2 which party spirit delighted to perpetuate.
But in the first public act of Prince George, he displayed the firmness of his character.
Heedless of the prime minister and the chancellor, the young man of eighteen, with many professions of duty to the king, expressed ‘his desires, nay, his fixed resolutions,’ to have ‘the free choice of his servants.’3 ‘This family,’ said Granville of the Hanoverian dynasty, ‘always has quarrelled, and will quarrel from generation to generation.’4 Having wantoned with the resentment of the successor and his mother, Newcastle became terrified and yielded.
The king gave his consent reluctantly.
‘You,’ said he angrily to Fox, ‘you have made me make that puppy Bute, groom of the stole.’
While Pitt formed intimate relations with the favorite of Leicester house, Charles Townshend, who had recently
1 Adolphus: Hist. of England, i. 12.
2 The scandal against the Princess Dowager, the mother of Geo. III., has been often repeated; yet it seems to have sprung from the malicious gossip of a profligate court. Waldegrave, a licentious man, is the chief accuser; Hardwicke, a disappointed politician, in a private letter, points a period with the insinuation. But the princess seems to have been reserved and decorous, as became the aged mother of a large family; and to have had no friendships but with those friends of her husband who were most naturally her counsellors.
3 Chatham Corr. i. 171.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1859.
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