George III. LECTURE LIV.-THE ENGLISH GEORGE. The American colonies. of Independence. The slave trade. The French Revolution. 1760. George III. 1. GEORGE III. had the longest reign of any English sovereign, and a wonderful reign it was. He was not at all a clever man; but for the greater part of the sixty years he wore the crown of England he was a very popular king. Many of us must have known people who remembered him and his days. They always spoke of him with kindness and affection; as "dear old George III.," "good old King George." Why was he so loved? we ask ourselves, though he was dull, obstinate, blundering, undignified. One reason, doubtless, was that he was an Englishman, and gloried in being so; for the nation had never loved its German kings. "This sovereign," said Walpole, "don't stand in one spot, with his eyes fixed royally on the ground, and dropping bits of German news; he walks about, and speaks to everybody." But more than that, with all his defects he was a good man. He said he intended to introduce a new custom, "that of living well with all his family." Instead of deserting or slighting his wife, and leading an immoral life, as the other two Georges had done, he was a good, true husband, a loving father, a sincere Christian. He loved his church and his Bible. He it was who said he longed for every poor man in his dominion to be able to read his Bible and to have a Bible to read. He was honest, and if he was obstinate, it was because he always believed the things he wished were the right things. He was simple-minded and kind-hearted. He got up early and went to bed early, and lived a quiet, good, and religious life. In his later years he was sorely afflicted, for he grew blind and lost his reason. 2. One of his greatest comforts in those sad times was sacred music; sometimes parts of Handel's beautiful oratorios. In one of the last lucid intervals he had, Thackeray tells how he was found by the queen "singing a hymn, and accompanying himself on the harpsichord. When he had finished he knelt down and prayed aloud for her, and then for his family, and then for the nation, concluding with a prayer for himself, that it might please God to avert his heavy calamity from him, but if not, to give him resignation to submit. He then burst into tears, and his reason again fled." 3. George III. had been better educated than his father, and as far as his lights went, was fond of literature and learned men. A love of books and of culture was more and 66 Education and art. more spread abroad. Any man," says Dr. Johnson, "who wears a sword and a powdered wig," and that meant in those days every gentleman, "is ashamed to be illiterate." It was George who gave Dr. Johnson his pension of £300 a year. 1768. 4. Not long afterwards he encouraged the founding of the Royal Academy of Arts. Through all these years, though cultivated Englishmen had been fond of pictures and statues, they had always been obliged to buy them abroad, or to employ foreigners to paint them in England. There were now, however, English artists who might stand, and not be ashamed, beside the greatest of the foreigners. The first president of the Royal Academy was Sir Joshua Reynolds. He and his friend and rival, Gainsborough, though they could paint as perfectly as the best of Italian artists, were generally content with painting portraits, or simple rural subjects. What they saw they painted beautifully: those men with the powdered wigs, who would have been ashamed to be illiterate; those lovely ladies, who look so stately and so innocent, and who still greet us, winter after winter, on the walls of the Royal Academy. Towards the latter end of George's long reign, Turner, the greatest landscape painter whom England or the world has ever known, was beginning to open the eyes of men to the infinite glory and majesty of earth, and sea, and sky. 5. The greatest misfortune which happened to England during his reign was the loss of her American colonies; and that misfortune, it is impossible to deny, was in great part due to poor King George's inveterate obstinacy. Loss of the The quarrel was caused by the tyranny of the mother country. Ever since the colonies had been American colonies. founded they had been greatly hampered in their manufactures It was an and their trade by the selfishness of England. established principle that the interests of all colonies and dependencies were to be quite subservient to those of England. 6. If it was thought that any article which England produced or manufactured could be provided better or cheaper in a colony, the colonists, instead of being encouraged to make and sell it, were hindered in every possible way. For example, in America they had plenty of iron and plenty of wool, far more than they wanted for themselves, and which other countries would have been very glad of; but as the English also had wool and iron, the American colonies were not allowed to make theirs into useful things and sell them to any one who wanted them, because the English wished to force all other nations to buy wool and iron from no one but themselves. 7. The English treated Ireland just in the same way, preventing the Irish from selling what they had to those who would have been glad to buy it. They were discouraged from weaving either wool or linen. At one time they were forbidden to sell the meat, butter, and cheese, which their green, fertile land produced in great abundance, even in England, lest people might buy from them instead of from English farmers. England, in fact, reminds one of Bottom in the play, who, not content with his own part, wants to act everybody else's part too. Hardly any one had yet begun to see that the more food and clothing and other useful things the earth produces, the better it is for all the inhabitants of the earth; and that if one country can produce one thing best, and another another, it is the wisest thing for them each to produce plenty, and to exchange it with one another as much and as often as they like, instead of hindering and thwarting each other by jealousy. 8. This selfish policy on the part of England alienated the hearts of the Americans, and helped on greatly in leading them to revolution. A still worse grievance was the taxation. The colonies knew very well that a main principle of the English constitution is that no tax can be imposed without the consent of the people taxed; that is to say, the consent of the representatives whom they choose to act and speak for them in parliament. Now the colonies had no one to speak for them in the English parliament; they sent no members there, but had a congress of their own, which laid on their taxes and attended to the local government. The English government, being now in great want of money, attempted to tax the colonies. Many of the Americans were descended from the old Puritans, and were men of the same type as Pym and Hampden; they resisted, just as their forefathers would have done. They declared that they would not pay taxes which were imposed by a parliament in which they were not represented. One of the colonists, who already took a principal part in the affairs of the country, and who afterwards rose to Washington. be the leader of all, was George Washington. He was a man quite worthy to be placed beside Hampden in our thoughts; he was brave, persevering, truthful, and magnanimous. In all his after life he never sought or accepted anything for himself; all he thought of was justice for his country. He had too the clear eye of a commander, and knew how to march to his ends through trouble, and difficulty, and danger. 9. At first the Americans had no wish to separate themselves from England; they only demanded "the rights and privileges which are essential to the happiness of every free state." Lord Chatham, as Pitt was now called, and the wisest of the king's other counsellors, advised him to give in, and said that the Americans were right. "We are told," said Lord Chatham, "America is obstinate; America is in open rebellion; I rejoice that America has resisted." But George, who had all the makings of a despotic monarch in him, and who loved his own way as dearly as ever a Tudor or a Stuart had done, would not give in. It was firmly fixed in his mind, that if the Americans succeeded, all the other colonies would also be lost, and England would "reduce itself to a poor island indeed." He called the Americans rebels, and he called Lord Chatham's speech "a trumpet of sedition." He said that if the English were resolute, the Americans would "undoubtedly be very meek." 10. But the Americans were not meek at all, and they would not yield. One of the grievances had been about the importation of tea. The government had made a decree demanding a certain duty to be paid by the Americans on all the tea which they received from the mother country. The Americans, women as well as men, bound themselves to drink no tea at all sooner than pay that duty; and at last, when some English ships laden with tea arrived in Boston Harbour, a mob dressed up like wild Indians uttered a loud war-whoop, boarded the ships, and flung all the chests of tea into the sea. Not long after this war was openly declared. It lasted ten years, and the end of it was that the colonies and their good cause 1778. colonies conquered, and they were declared independent of the 1783. mother country. When King George announced his The American consent to this declaration, he said very truly that in declared giving it he had sacrificed every consideration of his independent. own to the wishes and opinion of the people. He added a prayer that neither might Great Britain nor America suffer from their separation, and that "religion, language, interest, affections" might prove a bond of union between the two countries; a prayer to which every year seems to bring a wider fulfilment. trade. 11. This was an inglorious page in the history of England. A very few years after the Declaration of American Independence a great work was begun, which was as much to the The slave honour of the country. It was in 1787 that a few wise and good men set themselves to make England worthy of being called free, and the champion of freedom, by abolishing the trade in negro slaves. The wickedness of trafficking in human flesh and blood had at length begun to be realized by English Christians. The hideous cruelties of the trade, the ghastly miseries and tortures endured by the kidnapped victims, added to the rising feeling. It was a lady who first saw or said that pity and indignation were not enough; that half measures were of no avail, and that the whole matter ought to be laid before the House of Commons. 1787. The second William Pitt. 12. The charge of bringing the subject before parliament was given to William Wilberforce, one of the brightest and most ardent of the evangelical laymen, who, we may almost say, gave his whole noble life to that cause. The last letter the venerable John Wesley ever wrote was to Wilberforce, encouraging him in his holy war. Among all his helpers in the long battle, the most eminent was William Pitt, who was soon to be the leading man in the kingdom. The great Lord Chatham was dead, and his son William inherited a large portion of his talents and character. He, like his father, was noble and grand in all his ideas, proud of his country, proud of himself. He was prime minister of England when he was twenty-four years old. He made his first speech in parliament when only twenty-one. There were splendid orators in the House of Commons in those days. One of them, Burke, was so astonished and delighted at the young man's speech, which reminded him of his father, that he burst into tears, saying, "It is not a chip of the old block; it is the old block itself." 13. Wilberforce himself tells us how he talked over the subject |