Let us consider for a moment the character of the Sovereign whom Pitt had set himself to bait.

George II. was first and fundamentally a German prince of his epoch. What other could he be? And these magnates all aped Louis XIV. as their model. They built huge palaces, as like Versailles as their means would permit, and generally beyond those limits, with fountains and avenues and dismally wide paths. Even in our own day a German monarch has left, fortunately unfinished, an accurate Versailles on a damp island in a Bavarian lake. In these grandiose structures they cherished a blighting etiquette, and led lives as dull as those of the aged and torpid carp in their own stew-ponds. Then at the proper season, they would break away into the forest and kill game. Moreover, still in imitation of their model, they held, as a necessary feature in the dreary drama of their existence, ponderous dalliance with unattractive mistresses, in whom they fondly tried to discern the charms of a Montespan or a La ValliÈre. This monotonous programme, sometimes varied by a violent contest whether they should occupy a seat with or without a back, or with or without arms, represented the even tenor of their lives.

George II. was better than this training would suggest. His first ambition indeed was to be a Lovelace, but his second was to be a soldier. As a soldier he had the unaffected courage of the princes of his race. George, red and angry, fighting on foot at the battle of Dettingen, is a figure that is memorable and congenial to his British subjects.

As a Lovelace he lives to this day, for his portraits are generally in the posture of a coxcomb, with his face in outline wearing an irresistible smile, only comical to the beholder now, but with which he goes smirking into the eternities. It is not necessary to dwell on this part of his character; after all, a shallow part, for the one woman whom he loved was his wife. It was, however, a necessary part, vital to his conception of an ideal monarch. His confidences to his wife on this delicate point, though gross to us, seemed natural to him and to her, and were probably not alien to the atmosphere in which he was reared. Withal he bored his mistresses to death, and not impossibly they bored him. But that did not matter; the thing had to be done; he saw himself as in a mirror the fourteenth or fifteenth Louis; and when on the Saturdays in summer he drove down with Lady Yarmouth and his court to Richmond, escorted by Lifeguards kicking up the dust, to walk an hour in the garden, dine, and return to London, he imagined himself, as Horace Walpole tells us, the most gallant and lively prince in Europe![144]

We must admit then that he was born and bred a coxcomb, like his son. That he was a fond father no one will allege. His pleasures were coarse and dull. Even here one strange exception must be made. His letters to women, in the opinion of hostile critics, were tender and even exquisite.[145] How he came to write them we cannot know, for his character could not make one expect a grace of this kind.

In other respects we think him underrated. Sir Robert Walpole said that politically he was a coward. To what does this charge really amount? That a prince who had never left Germany till he was thirty-one, who succeeded to the throne when he was forty-four, after a life of such severe repression that his father even entertained the idea of transporting him to the plantations, should display that familiarity with his position, his political relations, and a strange nation, which alone could justify the independent action which is implied by the phrase 'political courage,' would have been astonishing; it would indeed have savoured of political recklessness. Walpole may have uttered the charge in resentment for some refusal of the King's. He was, we know, irritated at the moment by finding that the King had promised to go to Hanover without informing him. The King no doubt blustered in private when he yielded in public. But domestic effervescence was the only method of relief for a Sovereign who knew his own limitations, and who also knew that, constitutionally, he would have at last to yield to his Minister. What is 'political courage' in a constitutional Sovereign? What would Walpole have said had the monarch shown 'political courage' and insisted on having his own stubborn way? 'Had he,' wrote Waldegrave, with his usual good sense, 'always been as firm and undaunted in the Closet as he showed himself at Oudenarde and Dettingen, he might not have proved quite as good a king in this limited monarchy.'

His foible, we are told, was avarice. We do not know that he was mean in his personal expenditure. Waldegrave, again, who was fair, and knew him better than most men, declared that 'he was always just, and sometimes charitable, though rarely generous.' He amused himself, we are told, with counting his guineas in private. That perhaps was not a very royal occupation, though a nursery rhyme indicates that it is; it may have been a trick learned when he was poor, or it may have been his substitute for those games of anxious futility now known as 'patience.' But the real ground for the charge of avarice in the eyes of his British subjects was that he accumulated a great treasure in Hanover. If that be avarice, it was the avarice of the kings who made Prussia, the famous Frederick and his father. Parsimony in such cases may well be a virtue; and subjects may even prefer to be ruled by those who possess it rather than by princes who rear vast and idle palaces like the Bourbons of Spain and Naples, or live with unbridled extravagance like George IV. But kings rarely hit the right mean; if they are generous they are called profuse, if they are careful they are called mean. George's avarice, if such it was, was a public-spirited avarice. He hoarded for his own beloved country, he got as much out of his Kingdom as he could for his Electorate; for he was a Hanoverian first and a Briton a long way afterwards. But when Hanover needed it, he spent all his hoards on her behalf ungrudgingly, and died poor.

We do not claim him as a great King, far from it. But we think him unjustly and hastily condemned. It is easy in a slapdash manner to lavish sarcasms on a King who presented many tempting opportunities for satire. The genius of Thackeray could not resist them, small blame to it. But the King's absurdities should not blind one to his merits. The just critic must recognise in George II. a constant substantial shrewdness, seasoned with humour. His sagacity made him realise his constitutional limitations; his penetration appraised with great justice the men by whom he was surrounded; he had to do much that he disliked and resented, but he did it when he saw that it was necessary, not gracefully, for he was never graceful, but without scandal. His rough common sense constantly vented itself in the ejaculation of 'Stuff and nonsense,'[146] which proved his command of at least one British idiom, and not unfrequently a just appreciation of affairs. His judgment of men was sure. He had only three ministers who were men of commanding ability; Walpole, Carteret, and Pitt. Two of these were his especial favourites; to the third, who had mortally offended him, he submitted. For Newcastle he had a supreme contempt; but wisely accommodated himself to one who was useful, who 'did his business,' to whom he was accustomed, and whom he knew through and through. He infinitely preferred Carteret to Pelham, but at the supreme moment he chose Pelham in spite of Carteret. No doubt this was due largely to the influence of Walpole, but many kings would not have followed an advice so contrary to their own bias. He piqued himself on his knowledge of mankind, not without reason, and Hervey depicts a scene where he reels off a catalogue of names, and the King, tersely and unhesitatingly, gives the character of each.

The fact is that George II. had the misfortune to keep in his inmost circle a vigilant and deadly enemy. John Lord Hervey, the Sporus of Pope's blighting satire, akin in mind and probably in blood to Horace Walpole, was always with him; noting down, with spruce rancour, a venomous pen, and some dramatic power, the random outbreaks of his master. It is not wise to attribute literal exactitude or even general veracity to such chronicles; the man who can commit so gross a breach of confidence is little worthy of trust. That Hervey in the very heart of the King's family should have sate down with a pen dipped in vitriol to portray its most intimate aspects is perhaps our gain but his disgrace. He was a viper warmed in the bosom of the Court, and stung it to the full extent of his opportunity and powers. A court is considered fair game by such reptiles. But it is hard to see why princes, who after all are human beings, should not be allowed to some extent the same sanctity of family life which humbler human beings claim and maintain. Hervey was the intimate associate of the King, the confidential friend of the Queen, the lover of one of their daughters, he was the tame cat of the family circle. He thought it seemly to narrate their secrets in so brutal a fashion that some more decent member of his family tore out and destroyed the coarsest and bitterest passages. What remains is coarse and bitter enough. It shows the King and Queen in a most unfavourable light. But that aspect is fascinating compared to that in which he presents himself. The story of royalty should not be a Court Circular; but neither should it be a lampoon, written by a trusted friend. The only excuse for him is that being devoted to the Queen, who in her way merited his devotion, he detested the King whom he deemed unworthy of her. But that does not help the reader who looks to him for facts. The George II. we know is the George II. of Hervey, and Hervey's Journal proves the writer to be unworthy of implicit credence.

Chesterfield also drew a character of the King. But when we discount Chesterfield's studied epigrams, poised with the malignant nicety of one who hated his subject, there is not much left for discredit.

The real crime of George II. in the eyes of his British subjects was almost in the category of virtues, for it was his devotion to Hanover. Innocent and natural as it was in him, it seems wonderful to us that our fathers should have endured it. How they must have hated Popery! But Hanover was the King's home and fatherland; all his pleasant associations were with Hanover; there he was absolute Sovereign, and could lead without criticism the life that he enjoyed. He could not help being a Hanoverian any more than William III. could help being a Hollander. The English chose their Dutch and Hanoverian Sovereigns with their eyes open, and had no right to complain if what they desired and obtained was somewhat bitter in digestion. Neither William nor the two first Georges ever professed to be other than what they were; they never for a moment simulated that they were English, they never pretended to like England. 'He hated the English,' says Lord Hervey of George II. And when at the first available instant they fled from Kensington and Hampton Court to Loo or Herrenhausen, their English subjects ignored the mortifying preference, from devotion no doubt to the Protestant Succession; but partly also because these monarchs were profoundly indifferent to them. With George II., it is true, these excursions were accompanied, as in Shakespeare, by alarms; alarms only too well founded that he would return with a pocket full of treaties for subsidies which the British taxpayer would have to pay. But all these three kings accurately understood their position. They knew that they were not chosen from affection, or for their qualities, certainly not for their attractions. They were taken as necessities, almost odious necessities, to keep out a Romanist dynasty which represented something to the people that was more odious still.

They entertained, then, no illusions; a bargain had been driven with them and they would keep it; they gave their pound, or more, of flesh. They would occupy palaces, receive civil lists, interview ministers, and keep out the Pretender. But that did not imply a perpetual exile from home; they intended to get as many holidays as possible; and they did. They might be a hateful necessity for England, but England as a necessity was almost as hateful to them. Their life in this island was servitude, more or less penal; they only breathed by the dykes of Holland or the waters of the Leine. If this be clearly understood, much confusion and vituperation may be avoided. But the wonder is that the English (for the Scots and Irish had little to do with it) should have had the civic courage in the cause of religion and liberty to endure the compact.

George II. then, we contend, putting his private life apart, which we must judge by the German standard of those days, was not a bad King under the conditions of his time and of his throne. He was perhaps the best of the Georges; better than George I. or George IV., better as a King than George III., though inferior no doubt in the domestic virtues. All things considered, it is wonderful that he was as good as he was, and he scarcely deserves the thoughtless opprobrium which he has incurred.