DIGITISED MANUSCRIPTS

Ce) under the unintelligent guidance of his mother, the Dowager Princess of Wales, who confined him to the nursery almost to the day of his accession to the throne. On the one hand, she wilfully neglected his education; on the other, she inculcated in him the most extravagant notion of his future position, and of the royal prerogative of the Sovereign. ‘George, be a King!’ were the words with which she foolishly and constantly admonished him. To ‘be a king,’ in his mind, was to exercise a personal authority in the affairs of the nation, which, with the growth of constitutional freedom, had passed from the Crown to a Ministry responsible to Parliament, and in some degree to the country. Ignorant, narrow-minded, and arbitrary, George III. was resolved at all hazards to compel his Ministers to adopt his own views, which were generally erroneous ; and ever endeavoured to resist measures which are now admitted to have been good, and to forward measures which are as univer- sally admitted to have been bad. It might be said with regard to his whole public life, that, with the purest intentions, he managed to do as much mis- chief as it was possible for him to do. There is scarcely a field of politics in which his hand may not be discerned, either in postponing inevitable measures of reform, or in sowing seeds of enduring evil. In order to recover for the Crown the power | |