George II. the sentiment of religious loyalty altogether ceased to support the Crown.  The prerogative of the king had no strong party to support it; the Tories, who naturally would support it, disliked the actual king; and the Whigs, according to their creed, disliked the king’s office.  Until the accession of George III. the most vigorous opponents of the Crown were the country gentlemen, its natural friends, and the representatives of quiet rural districts, where loyalty is mostly to be found, if anywhere.  But after the accession of George III. the common feeling came back to the same point as in Queen Anne’s time.  The English were ready to take the new young prince as the beginning of a sacred line of sovereigns, just as they had been willing to take an old lady, who was the second cousin of his great-great-grandmother.  So it is now.  If you ask the immense majority of the Queen’s subjects by what right she rules, they would never tell you that she rules by Parliamentary right, by virtue of 6 Anne, c. 7.  They will say she rules by “God’s grace”; they believe that they have a mystic obligation to obey her.  When her family came to the Crown it was a sort of treason to maintain the inalienable right of lineal sovereignty, for it was equivalent to saying that the claim of another family was better than hers:  but now, in the strange course of human events, that very sentiment has become her surest and best support.

But it would be a great mistake to believe that at the accession of George III. the instinctive sentiment of hereditary loyalty at once became as useful as now.  It began to be powerful, but it hardly began to be useful.  There was so much harm done by it as well as so much good, that it is quite capable of being argued whether on the whole it was beneficial or hurtful.  Throughout the greater part of his life George III. was a kind of “consecrated obstruction”.  Whatever he did had a sanctity different from what any one else did, and it perversely happened that he was commonly wrong.  He had as good intentions as any one need have, and he attended to the business of his country, as a clerk with his bread to get attends to the business of his office.  But his mind was small, his education limited, and he lived in a changing time.  Accordingly, he was always resisting what ought to be, and prolonging what ought not to be.  He was the sinister but sacred assailant of half his ministries; and when the French Revolution excited the horror of the world, and proved democracy to be “impious,” the piety of England concentrated upon him, and gave him tenfold strength.  The Monarchy by its religious sanction now confirms all our political order; in George III.’s time it confirmed little except itself.  It gives now a vast strength to the entire Constitution, by enlisting on its behalf the credulous obedience of enormous masses; then it lived aloof, absorbed all the holiness into itself, and turned over all the rest of the polity to the coarse justification of bare expediency.