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, on the very day on which the bill became law, the King himself mentioned it to Lord Eldon, the Chancellor, and said that he acquiesced in it from perfect confidence in the advice of his physicians, and on the sound judgment and personal attachment of his ministers.

For the present, therefore, no change was made in the administration; but when, in the spring of the following year, Mr. Perceval was murdered, the necessity for a new arrangement which this strange and calamitous atrocity forced upon the Regent—­who by this time had come into possession of his full authority—­led to his making offers of the conduct of affairs to more than one prominent statesman, all of them, as is somewhat remarkable, being peers.  And, though the proposals eventually came to nothing, and the negotiations terminated in the re-establishment of the former ministry, with Lord Liverpool at its head, yet some of the causes to which their failure was publicly or generally attributed seem desirable to be recorded, because the first, and that most openly avowed, bears a not very distant resemblance to the complication which baffled Sir Robert Peel’s endeavors to form an administration in 1839; and another corresponds precisely to a proposal which, in 1827, the Regent—­then King George IV.—­did himself make to the Duke of Wellington.  It is unnecessary to dwell on the singular manner in which the Regent first professed