There is no reason for saying that the Hanover family is more quarrelsome than most other royal lines; and the domestic dissensions of great houses are more noted than those of lesser houses only because kings and nobles are so placed as to live in sight of the world.  When a king falls out with his eldest son, the entertainment is one to which all men go as spectators, and historians consider it to be the first of their duties to give full details of that entertainment.  Since the Hanoverians have reigned over the English, the world has been a writing and a reading world, and nothing has more interested writers and readers than the dissensions of sovereigns and their sons.  If we extend our observation to those days when German sovereigns were unthought of in England, we shall find that kings and princes did not always agree; and if we go farther, and scan the histories of other royal houses, we shall learn that it is not in Britain alone that the wearers of crowns have looked with aversion upon their heirs, and have had sons who have loved them so well and truly as to wish to witness their promotion to heavenly crowns.  The Hanoverian monarchs of England, and their sons, have shared only the common lot of those who reign and those who wish to reign.

The Norman kings of England did not always live on good terms with their sons.  William the Conqueror had a very quarrelsome family.  His children quarrelled with one another, and the King quarrelled with his wife.  The oldest son of William and Matilda was Robert, afterward Duke of Normandy,—­and a very trying time this young man caused his father to have; while the mother favored the son, probably out of revenge for the beatings she had received, with fists and bridles, from her royal husband, who used to swear “By the Splendor of God!”—­his favorite oath, and one that has as much merit as can belong to any piece of blasphemy,—­that he never would be governed by a woman.  The father and son went to war, and they actually met in battle, when the son ran the old gentleman through the arm with his lance, and dropped him out of the saddle with the utmost dexterity.  This was the first time that the Conqueror was ever conquered, and perhaps it was not altogether without complacency that “the governor” saw what a clever fellow his eldest son was with his tools.  At the time of William’s death Robert was on bad terms with him, and is believed to have been bearing arms against him.  Henry I. lost his sons before he could well quarrel with them, the wreck of the White Ship causing the death of his heir-apparent, and also of his natural son Richard.  He compensated for this omission by quarrelling with his daughter Matilda, and with her husband, Geoffrey of Anjou.  He made war on his brother Robert, took from him the Duchy of Normandy, and shut him up for life; but the story, long believed, that he put out Robert’s eyes, has been called in question by modern writers.  King Stephen, who bought his breeches at so low a figure, had a falling-out