than 108 members are
set down as "independent or unconnected;" the party ascribed to Fox
musters 138, while that of Pitt is only estimated at 52, with the
minimizing comment that "of this party, were there a new Parliament, and
Mr. P. no longer to continue minister, not above twenty would be
returned." In the face of difficulties like these Pitt stood practically
alone. His was no Ministry "of All the Talents;" the ranks of the
Ministry did not represent, even in a lesser degree, the rich variety of
ability that made the Opposition so formidable.

[Sidenote: 1788--Prince George Augustus Frederick]

If the King was at best but a lukewarm supporter of his splendid
minister, the heir to the throne was the minister's very warm and
persistent enemy. When Pitt came to power the Prince of Wales was, and
had been for some time, a conspicuous figure in society, a fitful element
in political life, and a subject of considerable scandal to the public
mind. George the Third was not the kind of man to be happy with or to
bring happiness to his children. Possessed of many of those virtues
which are supposed to make for domestic peace, he nevertheless failed
signally to attach to himself the affection of his children. One and
all, they left him as soon as they could, came back to him as seldom as
they could. The King's idea of firmness was always a more or less
aggravated form of tyranny, and he reaped in loneliness the harvest of
his early harshness. Between his eldest son and himself there soon arose
and long continued that feud between the reigning sovereign and his heir
which seemed traditional in the House of Hanover.

George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales, has many claims to be
regarded as perhaps the worst, and as certainly the most worthless,
prince of his House. Something was to be excused in the son of such a
father; some wild oats were surely to be sown in the soil of a childhood
so dully and so sourly cultivated. But no severity of early surroundings
will explain or palliate the unlovely mixture of folly and of falseness,
of debauchery, vulgarity, profligacy, and baseness, which were the most
conspicuous {242} characteristics of the Prince's nature. The malignant
enemy of his unhappy father, the treacherous lover, the perjured friend,
a heartless fop, a soulless sot, the most ungentlemanly First Gentleman
of Europe, his memory baffles the efforts of the sycophant and paralyzes
the anger of the satirist.