chap. XVII.} 1760. Oct. |
Nov. |
This text is part of:
[384]
insisted that the address should be amended; that
it was false to say the war had been to England a bloody war;1 and after an altercation of two or three hours with Lord Bute, he extorted the king's reluctant consent to substitute as his own these words: ‘As I mount the throne in the midst of an expensive but just and necessary war, I shall endeavor to prosecute it in a manner most likely to bring on an honorable and lasting peace in concert with my allies.’
The amendments of Pitt gave to the address dignity and nationality.
The wound to the royal authority rankled in the breast of the king.
He took care to distinguish Newcastle above all others; and on the third day after his accession, he called Bute, who was but his groom of the stole, and who had forfeited Pitt's friendship,2 not to the Privy Council only, but also to the cabinet.3
On the last day of October, the king published a proclamation ‘for the encouragement of piety, and for preventing immorality.’
This public appeal corresponded with his personal habits; and in a kingdom, where, for nearly fifty years, the king's mistresses, in rank the peeresses of the highest aristocracy, had introduced vulgarity with licentiousness, and had rivalled the ministry in political influence, the serious people of England were fired with loyalty towards a monarch who had been trained in seclusion as temperately and chastely as a nun.
To the draft which Hardwicke and Pitt had made
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1859.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.