What made it worse, and finally impossible, was the character of the king.  The pathetic circumstances of his old age have combined somewhat to obscure the viciousness of his maturity.  He was excessively ignorant and as obstinate as arbitrary.  He trusted no one but himself, and he totally misunderstood the true nature of his office.  There is no question which arose in the first forty years of his reign in which he was not upon the wrong side and proud of his error.  He was wrong about Wilkes, wrong about America, wrong about Ireland, wrong about France.  He demanded servants instead of ministers.  He attacked every measure for the purification of the political system.  He supported the Slave trade and he opposed the repeal of the Test Act.  He prevented the grant of Catholic emancipation at the one moment when it might have genuinely healed the wounds of Ireland.  He destroyed by his perverse creations the value of the House of Lords as a legislative assembly.  He was clearly determined to make his will the criterion of policy; and his design might have succeeded had his ability and temper been proportionate to its greatness.  It was not likely that the mass of men would have seen with regret the destruction of the aristocratic monopoly in politics.  The elder Pitt might well have based a ministry of the court upon a broad bottom of popularity.  The House of Commons, as the event proved, could be as subservient to the king as to his minister.

Yet the design failed; and it failed because, with characteristic stupidity, the king did not know the proper instruments for his purpose.  Whatever he touched he mismanaged.  He aroused the suspicion of the people by enforcing the resignation of the elder Pitt.  In the Wilkes affair he threw the clearest light of the century upon the true nature of the House of Commons.  His own system of proscription restored to the Whig party not a little of the idealism it had lost; and Burke came to supply them with a philosophy.  Chatham remained the idol of the people despite his hatred.  He raised Wilkes to be the champion of representative government and of personal liberty.  He lost America and it was not his fault that Ireland was retained.  The early popularity he received he never recovered until increasing years and madness had made him too pathetic for dislike.  The real result of his attempt was to compel attention once again to the foundations of politics; and George’s effort, in the light of his immense failures, could not, in the nature of things, survive that analysis.

Not, of course, that George ever lacked defenders.  As early as 1761, the old rival of Walpole, Pulteney, whom a peerage had condemned to obsolescence, published his Seasonable Hints from an Honest Man on the new Reign.  Pulteney urged the sovereign no longer to be content with the “shadow of royalty.”  He should use his “legal prerogatives” to check “the illegal claims of factious oligarchy.”  Government had become the private possession of a