the different speakers insisted; though it is worth remarking that
Lord Holland, who, as the nephew of Fox, thought it incumbent on him to
follow his uncle's guidance, did on one point practically depart from
it. As his uncle had done, he denied the right of the Houses to impose
any restrictions on the Prince's exercise of the royal authority; but,
at the same time, he consented to put what may be called a moral
limitation on that exercise, by adding to an amendment which he proposed
to the resolution proposed by the minister an expression of "the farther
opinion of the House that it will be expedient to abstain from the
exercise of all such powers as the immediate exigencies of the state
shall not call into action, until Parliament shall have passed a bill or
bills for the future care of his Majesty's royal person during his
Majesty's present indisposition."

It is remarkable that the leaders of the Opposition were in a great
degree stimulated in the line they took by the very same hopes which had
animated Fox and his followers in 1789--the expectation that the
Regent's first act would be to discard the existing ministry, and to
place them in office. But again they were disappointed in their
anticipations, of the realization of which they had made so sure that
they had taken no pains to keep them secret. They even betrayed their
mortification to the world when the Prince's intentions on the subject
of the administration became known by the violence of their language in
Parliament, some of their party denouncing the employment of the Great
Seal to give the royal assent to the bill as "fraud and forgery." Nor,
indeed, could the Regent himself, even while expressing his intention to
make no change in the administration, lest "any act of his might in the
smallest degree have the effect of interfering with the progress of his
sovereign's recovery," suppress an expression of dissatisfaction at the
recent arrangements, which he considered had placed him in "a situation
of unexampled embarrassment," and had created "a state of affairs ill
calculated, as he feared, to sustain the interests of the United Kingdom
in this awful and perilous crisis, and most difficult to be reconciled
to the general principles of the British constitution."[166] There were
at this time general and apparently well-founded hopes of the King's
recovery. For at intervals during the whole of January the
Prime-minister had interviews with his Majesty; and,