It would be childish to suppose that a conference between a Minister and his sovereign can ever be a conference of pure argument.  “The divinity which doth hedge a king” may have less sanctity than it had, but it still has much sanctity.  No one, or scarcely any one, can argue with a Cabinet Minister in his own room as well as he would argue with another man in another room.  He cannot make his own points as well; he cannot unmake as well the points presented to him.  A monarch’s room is worse.  The best instance is Lord Chatham, the most dictatorial and imperious of English statesmen, and almost the first English statesman who was borne into power against the wishes of the king and against the wishes of the nobility—­the first popular Minister.  We might have expected a proud tribune of the people to be dictatorial to his sovereign—­to be to the king what he was to all others.  On the contrary, he was the slave of his own imagination; there was a kind of mystic enchantment in vicinity to the monarch which divested him of his ordinary nature.  “The least peep into the king’s closet,” said Mr. Burke, “intoxicates him, and will to the end of his life.”  A wit said that, even at the levee, he bowed so low that you could see the tip of his hooked nose between his legs.  He was in the habit of kneeling at the bedside of George III. while transacting business.  Now no man can argue on his knees.  The same superstitious feeling which keeps him in that physical attitude will keep him in a corresponding mental attitude.  He will not refute the bad arguments of the king as he will refute another man’s bad arguments.  He will not state his own best arguments effectively and incisively when he knows that the king would not like to hear them.  In a nearly balanced argument the king must always have the better, and in politics many most important arguments are nearly balanced.  Whenever there was much to be said for the king’s opinion it would have its full weight; whatever was said for the Minister’s opinion would only have a lessened and enfeebled weight.

The king, too, possesses a power, according to theory, for extreme use on a critical occasion, but which he can in law use on any occasion.  He can dissolve; he can say to his Minister, in fact, if not in words, “This Parliament sent you here, but I will see if I cannot get another Parliament to send some one else here.”  George III. well understood that it was best to take his stand at times and on points when it was perhaps likely, or at any rate not unlikely, the nation would support him.  He always made a Minister that he did not like tremble at the shadow of a possible successor.  He had a cunning in such matters like the cunning of insanity.  He had conflicts with the ablest men of his time, and he was hardly ever baffled.  He understood how to help a feeble argument by a tacit threat, and how best to address it to an habitual deference.