In the
course of the year, too, all the remaining French territory in the West
Indies, as well as the Isle of Bourbon in the Indian Ocean, was captured
by the British navy. But this unchallenged supremacy on the high seas
did not prevent the depredations of French gunboats on British
merchantmen in the channel. Indeed after the battle of Trafalgar, the
French "sea-wasps" infesting the Channel were more active and
destructive than ever.

On October 25, being the forty-ninth anniversary of his accession, the
jubilee of George III. was celebrated with hearty and sincere
rejoicings. His popularity was not unmerited. He was politically
shortsighted, but within his range of vision few saw facts so clearly;
he was obstinate and prejudiced, but his obstinacy was redeemed by a
moral intrepidity of the highest order, and his prejudices were shared
by the mass of his people. Having lived through the seven years' war,
the war of the American revolution, and the successive wars of Great
Britain against the French monarchy and the French republic, he was now
supporting, with indomitable firmness, a war against the all-conquering
French empire--the most perilous in which this country was ever engaged.
The colonial and Indian dominions of Great Britain, reduced by the loss
of the North American colonies, had been greatly extended during his
reign in other quarters of the globe. His subjects regarded him as an
Englishman to the core; they knew him to be honest, religious, virtuous,
and homely in his life; they justly believed him, in spite of his
failings, to be a power for good in the land; and they rewarded him with
a respect and affection granted to no other British sovereign of modern
times before Queen Victoria. They had good cause to desire the
continuance of his life and reason, knowing the character of his
heir-apparent, and contrasting the domestic habits of Windsor with the
licence of Carlton House.

FOOTNOTES:

[31] Colchester, _Diary_ (Feb. 4, 1806), ii., 35, 36.

[32] Holland, _Memoirs of the Whig Party_, ii., 91-94.

[33] Holland, _Memoirs of the Whig Party,_ ii., 173-205, 270-320;
Colchester, _Diary_, ii., 92-115; Malmesbury, _Diaries_, iv., 357-72;
Walpole, _Life of Perceval_, i., 223-33; Buckingham, _Courts and
Cabinets_, iv., 117-50. Holland accuses the king of treachery and
duplicity, and Lewis (_Administrations of Great Britain_, p. 294)
repeats this charge in milder terms. But the documents quoted do not
prov