1760. DEATH OF THE KING. 403 religious feeling, the tenderest sympathy, the gentlest and bravest pity. Yorick, in the black and white of his sacred calling's gown and bands, grins and leers like a disguised satyr. His morality is a mummer's mask; his pathos is pretence; the only thing truly Irish about him is his humour, his ceaseless wit, the unfailing sparkle of his fancy. Quite suddenly the ghastly tragi-comedy of the King's life came to an end. There was, we are told, a strange affectation of an incapacity to be sick that ran through the whole Royal Family, which they carried so far that few of them were more willing to own any other member of the family ill than to acknowledge themselves to be so. 'I have known the King,' says Hervey, 'get out of his bed choking with a sore throat, and in a high fever, only to dress and have a levée, and in five minutes undress and return to his bed till the same ridiculous farce of health was to be presented the next day at the same hour.' It must be owned, however, that George made a stout fight against ill-health, and if he shammed being well he kept up the sham for a good long time. He came into the world more than a dozen years before Lord Hervey was born, and he contrived to keep his place in it for some seventeen years after Lord Hervey had died. Time had nearly come round with George as with Shakespeare's Cassius; his death fell very near to his birthday. George was born on October 30, 1683, and on October 25, 1760, he was on the verge of completing his seventyseventh year. On October 25, 1760, he woke early, as was his custom, drank his chocolate, inquired as to the quarter whence the wind came, and talked of a walk in the garden. That walk in the garden was never taken. The page who attended on the King had left the room. He heard a groan and the sound of a fall. He came back, and found the King a helpless heap upon the floor. 'Call Amelia,' the dying man gasped, but before Amelia could be called he was dead. Amelia, when she came, being a little deaf, did not grasp at once the full extent of what had happened, and bent over her father only to learn in the most startling and shocking manner that her father was dead. The Countess of Walmoden, too, was sent for. It would seem as if the ample charms of the Countess of Walmoden, which had delighted George so much while he lived, might have some power to conjure him back from the common doom of kings. But George the Second was dead beyond the power of all the fat and painted women in the world to help. 'Friends,' says Thackeray in his Essay, 'he was your fathers' king as well as mine; let us drop a respectful tear over his grave.' But indeed it is very hard to drop a respectful tear over the grave of George the Second. Seldom has any man been a king with fewer kingly qualities. He had courage, undoubtedly-courage enough to be habitually described by the Jacobites as 'the Captain,' but his courage was the courage of a captain and not of a king. He was obstinate, he was narrow-minded, he was selfish, he was repulsively and even ridiculously incontinent. The usual 1727-60. DEATH OF THE KING. 405 quantity of base and servile adulation was poured over the Royal coffin. The same abject creatures— they or their kind-that had rhymed their lying verses over the dead Prince of Wales who had hated his father, now rhymed their lying verses over the dead King who had hated his son. If George the Second had been a more common man, instead of being Elector of Hanover and King of England, one might have said of him frankly enough that he was a person about as little to be admired as a man well could be who was not a coward or in the ordinary sense of the term a criminal. But because he was a crowned king, it was regarded as a patriotic duty then to make much of the departed monarch and to talk of him in the strain which would have been appropriate if he had been a Marcus Aurelius. The best, perhaps, that can be said of him is that, on the whole, all things considered, he might have been worse. It would be unfair to a George who has, at a long interval, to succeed him, to say that George the Second was actually the worst of his line and name; but he was so little, so very little, worthy, that the fulsome pens must have laboured in his praise. If many people rejoiced at his removal, it would be hard to say who grieved, with the exception of a few, a select few, of his family and the hangers-on of the Walmoden type, to whom his existence was the essential figure in their own existence. To the vast bulk of the English people the matter was of no moment whatever. All that they knew was that a second George, who was Elector of Hanover, had passed away from the English throne, and that a third George, who was Elector of Hanover, had mounted into the vacant seat. Never was a king better served than George the Second; never had so ignoble a sovereign such men to make his kingdom strong and his reign famous. He began his time of royalty under the protection of the sturdy figure of Walpole; he closed it under the protection of the stately form of Pitt. END OF THE SECOND VOLUME. PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE |