nistry of All the Talents found itself
in direct collision with its royal master. It had ventured to suggest
that it should be permitted to Catholics and to Dissenters to serve the
King and the country in the Army and Navy. This small concession was
too vast for the bigotry of George. He would have none of it, and the
obsequious Ministry consented to abandon the measure. This was not
enough for George. He wanted to extract from the Ministry a formal
promise in writing that it would never submit to the sovereign any
measure that involved, or was in any way connected with, concessions to
the Catholics. The Ministry was not obsequious to that ignoble degree.
It refused to bind itself by any such degrading pledge; and, in
consequence, it was turned out of office, and the Duke of Portland and
Mr. Perceval reigned in its stead. The Ministry of All the Talents had
lived neither a long nor a useful life.

{341}

Spencer Perceval was an able lawyer, a dexterous debater, a skilful
Parliamentarian. He was privately an excellent man, with an excellence
that the irony of Sydney Smith has made immortal. He was not quite the
man to sit in the Siege Perilous that had been occupied in turn by Pitt
and Fox. He held his office under difficult conditions. In 1810 the
King, whose ailing mind was unhinged by the death of his daughter
Amelia, lost his reason irreparably. Perceval had to fight the
question of the Regency with a brilliant Opposition and a bitterly
hostile Prince of Wales. He succeeded, in the January of 1811, in
carrying his Regency Bill on the lines of the measure proposed in 1788.
In May, 1811, he was shot dead, in the Lobby of the House of Commons,
by a madman named John Bellingham, who had some crazy grievance against
the Government.

The years from the January of 1811 to the January of 1820 are
technically the last nine years of the reign of George the Third; they
are practically the first nine years of the reign of George the Fourth.
The nine years of the Regency were momentous years in the history of
England. The mighty figure of Napoleon, whose shadow, creeping over
the map of Europe, had darkened and shortened the life of Pitt, was
still an abiding menace to England when the Prince of Wales became
Regent. But England, that had lost so much in her struggle with the
Corsican conqueror, who had now no Nelson to oppose to him on the high
seas, and no Pitt to oppose to him in the council chamber, found
he