from office; and they
were more than eager to sell their support. The Church had become the
creature of the State. The drift of opinion in continental Europe was
towards benevolent despotism. The narrow, obstinate and ungenerous mind
of George had been fed on high notions of the power he might exert. He
had been taught the kingship of Bolingbroke's glowing picture; and a
reading in manuscript of the seventh chapter of Blackstone's first book
can only have confirmed the ideals he found there. Nor was it obvious
that a genuine kingship would have been worse than the oligarchy of the
great Whig families.

What made it worse, and finally impossible, was the character of the
king. The pathetic circumstances of his old age have combined somewhat
to obscure the viciousness of his maturity. He was excessively ignorant
and as obstinate as arbitrary. He trusted no one but himself, and he
totally misunderstood the true nature of his office. There is no
question which arose in the first forty years of his reign in which he
was not upon the wrong side and proud of his error. He was wrong about
Wilkes, wrong about America, wrong about Ireland, wrong about France. He
demanded servants instead of ministers. He attacked every measure for
the purification of the political system. He supported the Slave trade
and he opposed the repeal of the Test Act. He prevented the grant of
Catholic emancipation at the one moment when it might have genuinely
healed the wounds of Ireland. He destroyed by his perverse creations the
value of the House of Lords as a legislative assembly. He was clearly
determined to make his will the criterion of policy; and his design
might have succeeded had his ability and temper been proportionate to
its greatness. It was not likely that the mass of men would have seen
with regret the destruction of the aristocratic monopoly in politics.
The elder Pitt might well have based a ministry of the court upon a
broad bottom of popularity. The House of Commons, as the event proved,
could be as subservient to the king as to his minister.

Yet the design failed; and it failed because, with characteristic
stupidity, the king did not know the proper instruments for his
purpose. Whatever he touched he mismanaged. He aroused the suspicion of
the people by enforcing the resignation of the elder Pitt. In the Wilkes
affair he threw the clearest light of the century upon the true nature
of the House of Commons. His own system of proscr