A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV | Page 2

of the late sovereign had grown quite cold in the royal vault. It would be idle, at this time of day, to affect any serious belief that the grief of the British people at this sudden taking off, had it come to pass, would have exceeded any possibility of consolation. George the Fourth was an elderly personage when he came to the throne, he had been known to his subjects as a deputy King for many years, his mode of living had long been a familiar subject of scandal among all classes of his people, and no one could have supposed that the prosperity of the country {2} depended to any measurable extent on the continuance of his life.
[Sidenote: 1820--Lord Liverpool's Administration]
George, however, recovered. His illness proved therefore to be only one among the unpropitious conditions which accompanied the dawn of his reign. Almost the next thing that was heard of him by the outer world was that he had inaugurated his work of government by calling on his ministers to assist him in obtaining a divorce from his wife. Not often, it must be admitted, has a sovereign just succeeding to a throne thus celebrated his attainment of regal rank. Then, again, the beginning of George the Fourth's reign was immediately followed by the explosion of a conspiracy belonging to an order uncommon indeed in the England of those days, almost wholly unknown to the England of our own time, and resembling in its principal characteristics some of the Nihilist or Anarchist enterprises common even still in certain parts of the European continent. Thus opened the first chapter of the reign of King George the Fourth. We shall have to go more fully into details, and we only print these few lines as what used to be called in former days the argument of our first chapters.
George was too unwell to stand by his father's bedside when the poor old King was passing, at last, out of that life which had so long been one of utter darkness to him. George, the son, had taken cold in his beloved pavilion at Brighton, and the cold soon developed into an illness so serious that for some days it was believed the now King was destined to succeed his father in the grave almost as soon as he had succeeded him in the sovereignty. George's life of excesses had not, however, completely worn out the fine constitution with which nature had originally endowed him, and despite the kind of medical treatment favored at that time, the old familiar panacea, which consisted mainly in incessant bleeding, the King recovered. He was soon able to receive the official addresses of loyalty, to despatch to Louis the Eighteenth and other European sovereigns his formal announcement of the fact that he had succeeded to the throne, his formal expressions of grief at {3} the loss of his beloved father, and his formal assurances of his resolve to do all he could to maintain harmonious relations with the rulers of foreign States. He retained the ministers whom he had found in office, and who were, of course, his own ministers. Lord Liverpool was Prime Minister, Lord Eldon was Lord Chancellor, Lord Palmerston was one of the younger members of the administration.
The times were troublous. Lord Liverpool's long tenure of office had been marked, so far as foreign affairs were concerned, by a resolute hostility to every policy and all movements which tended in a revolutionary direction, and to Lord Liverpool and his closest colleagues the whole principle of popular liberty was merely the principle of revolution. In home affairs Lord Liverpool had always identified himself with systems of political repression, systems which were established on the theory that whenever there was any talk of popular grievance the only wise and just course was to put in prison the men from whose mouths such talk came forth. On financial questions Lord Liverpool appears to have entertained some enlightened views, views that were certainly in advance of the political economy professed by most of his colleagues, but where distinctly political controversy came up he may be taken as a fair illustration of the old-fashioned Tory statesmanship. Eldon, the Lord Chancellor, had a great deal of shrewdness in his mental constitution, a shrewdness which very often took the form of selfishness; and although he exhibited himself for the most part as a genuine Tory, one is inclined to doubt whether he did not now and then indulge in a secret chuckle at the expense of those among his colleagues who really believed that the principles of old-fashioned Toryism were the only sound principles of government.
The first business of State into which the new sovereign threw his whole heart and soul was the endeavor to solemnize the opening of his