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Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. written by Various

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV.



THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. XI--FEBRUARY, 1863.--NO. LXIV.




SOVEREIGNS AND SONS.


The sudden death of Prince Albert caused profound regret, and the
Royal Family of Britain had the sincere sympathies of the civilized
world on that sad occasion. The Prince Consort was a man of brilliant
talents, and those talents he had cultivated with true German
thoroughness. His knowledge was extensive, various, and accurate.
There was no affectation in his regard for literature, art, and
science; for he felt toward them all as it was natural that an
educated gentleman of decided abilities, and who had strongly
pronounced intellectual tastes, should feel. Though he could not be
said to hold any official position, his place in the British Empire
was one of the highest that could be held by a person not born to the
sceptre. His knowledge of affairs, and the confidence that was placed
in him by the sovereign, made it impossible that he should not be
a man of much influence, no matter whether he was recognized by the
Constitution or not. As the director of the education of the princes
and princesses, his children, his character and ideas are likely to be
felt hereafter, when those personages shall have become the occupants
of high and responsible stations. The next English sovereign will be
pretty much what he was made by his father; and it is no light thing
to have had the formation of a mind that may be made to act, with
more or less directness, on the condition of two hundred millions of
people.

We know it is the custom to speak of the Government of England as if
there were no other powerful institution in that Empire than the House
of Commons; and that very arrogant gentleman, Mr. John Arthur Roebuck,
has told us, in his usual style, that the crown is a word, and nothing
more. "The crown!" exclaimed the member for Sheffield, in 1858,--"the
crown! it is the House of Commons!" Theoretically Mr. Roebuek is
right, and the British practice conforms to the theory, whenever the
reigning prince is content to receive the theory, and to act upon it:
but all must depend upon that prince's character; and should a British
sovereign resolve to rule as well as to reign, he might give the House
of Commons much trouble, in which the whole Empire would share. The
House of Commons was never stronger than it was in the latter part of
1760. For more than seventy years it had been the first institution in
the State, and for forty-six years the interest of the sovereign had
been to maintain its supremacy. The king was a cipher. Yet a new
king had but to appear to change everything. George III. ascended the
throne with the determination not to be the slave of any minister,
himself the slave of Parliament; and from the day that he became king
to the day that the decline of his faculties enforced his retirement,
his personal power was everywhere felt, and his personal character
everywhere impressed itself on the British world, and to no ordinary
extent on other countries. George III. was not a great man, and it has
been argued that his mind was never really sound; and yet of all men
who then lived, and far more than either Washington or Napoleon, he
gave direction and color and tone to all public events, and to not
a little of private life, and much of his work will have everlasting
endurance. He did not supersede the House of Commons, but he would not
be the simple vizier of that many-headed sultan, which for the most
part became his humble tool. Yet he was not a popular sovereign until
he had long occupied the throne, and had perpetrated deeds that should
have destroyed the greatest popularity that sovereign ever possessed.
It was not until after the overthrow of the Fox-and-North Coalition
that he found himself popular, and so he remained unto the end. The
change that he wrought, and the power that he wielded in the State,--a
power as arbitrary as that of Louis XV.,--were the fruits of his
personal character, and that character was the consequence of the
peculiar education which he had received.

Lord Brougham tells us that George III. "was impressed with a lofty
feeling of his prerogative, and a firm determination to maintain,
perhaps extend it. At all events, he was resolved not to be a mere
name or a cipher in public affairs; and whether from a sense of the
obligations imposed upon him by his station, or from a desire to enjoy
all its powers and privileges, he certainly, while his reason remained
entire, but especially during the earlier period of his reign,
interfered in the affairs of government more than any prince who ever
sat upon the throne of this country since our monarchy was distinctly
admitted to be a limited one, and its executive functions were
distributed among responsible ministers. The correspondence which he
carried on with his confidential servants during the ten most critical
years of his life lies before us, and it proves that his attention was
ever awake to all the occurrences of the government. Not a step was
taken in foreign, colonial, or domestic affairs, that he did not
form his opinion upon it, and exercise his influence over it. The
instructions to ambassadors, the orders to governors, the movements of
forces, down to the marching of a single battalion, in the districts
of this country, the appointment to all offices in Church and State,
not only the giving away of judgeships, bishoprics, regiments, but the
subordinate promotions, lay and clerical,--all these form the topics
of his letters; on all his opinion is pronounced decisively; in
all his will is declared peremptorily. In one letter he decides the
appointment of a Scotch puisne judge; in another the march of a troop
from Buckinghamshire into Yorkshire; in a third the nomination to
the Deanery of Westminster; in a fourth he says, that, 'if Adam, the
architect, succeeds Worsley at the Board of Works, he shall think
Chambers ill used.' For the greater affairs of State it is well known
how substantially he insisted upon being the king _de facto_ as well
as _de jure_. The American War, the long exclusion of the Liberal
party, the French Revolution, the Catholic question, are all sad
monuments of his real power."

This is a true picture of George III., and why it should be supposed
that no descendant of that monarch will ever be able to make himself
potently felt in the government of his Empire we are at a loss to
understand. The exact part of that monarch would not be repeated, the
world having changed so much as to render such repetition impossible;
but the end at which George III. aimed, and which he largely
accomplished for himself, that end being the vindication of the
monarchical element in the British polity, might be undertaken by one
of his great-grandsons with every reason to expect success. The means
employed would have to be different from those which George III. made
use of, but that would prove nothing against the project itself.
The men who followed Cromwell to the Long Parliament and the men who
followed Bonaparte into the Council of Five Hundred were differently
clothed and armed, but the pikemen of the future Protector were
engaged in the same kind of work that was afterward done by the
grenadiers of the future Emperor. The one set of men had never
heard of the bayonet, and the other set had faith in nothing but the
bayonet, believing it to be as "holy" as M. Michelet asserts it to
be. The pikemen were the most pious of men, and could have eaten an
Atheist with relish, after having roasted him. The grenadiers were
Atheists, and cared no more for Christianity than for Mahometanism,
their chief having testified his regard for the latter, and
consequently his contempt for both, only the year before, in Egypt.
Yet both detachments were successfully employed in doing the same
thing, and that was the clearing away of what was regarded as
legislative rubbish, in order that military monarchies might be
erected on the cleared ground. In each instance there was the element
of violence actively at work, and it makes no possible difference that
the English Commons went out because they did not care to come to push
of pike, and that the French Representatives departed rather than risk
the consequence of a bayonet-charge. So if the Prince of Wales should
see fit to tread in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, he would
have very different instruments from those "king's friends" whose
existence and actions were so fatal to ministers in the early part of
those days when George III. was king.

It is a common remark, that the institutions of England have been so
far reformed in a democratic direction, that no monarch could ever
expect to become powerful in that country. We think the observation
unphilosophical; and it is because the old aristocratical system of
England received a heavy blow in 1832 that we believe a king of that
country could make himself a ruler in fact as well as in theory.
Between a king and an aristocracy there never can be anything like a
sincere attachment, unless the king be content to be recognized as
the first member of the patrician order, to be _primus inter pares_ in
strict good faith, an agent of his class, but not the sovereign of his
kingdom. Kings generally prefer new men to men of established position
and old descent. They have a fondness for low-born favorites, who are
not only cleverer than most aristocrats will condescend to be, but who
recognize a chief in a monarch, and enable him to feel and to enjoy
his superiority when in their company. The hostility that prevails
between the peer and the _parvenu_ is the most natural thing in the
world, and is no more to be wondered at than that between the hare and
the hound. In earlier times the peerage had the best of it, and could
hang up the _parvenus_ with wonderful despatch,--as witness the
fate of Cochrane and his associates, favorites of the third James of
Scotland, who swung in the wind over Lauder Bridge. In later times
brains and intelligence tell in and on the world, and the peers,
having no longer pit and gallows for the punishment of presumptuous
plebeians who dare to get between them and the regal sunshine, must be
content to see those plebeians basking in the royal rays, if they are
not capable of outdoing them in those arts that ever have been found
most useful in the advancement of the interest of courtiers. Hanging
and heading have gone mostly out of date, or the peer would be in more
danger than the upstart.

The Reform Bill has made it much easier for a king of Great Britain to
become a ruler than it was for George III. to carry his point over
the old aristocracy, for it has created a class of voters who could be
easily won over to the aid of a king engaged in a project that should
not injure them, while its success should reduce the power of the
aristocracy. The father of the Reform Bill made a strange mistake
as to the character of that measure. "I hope," said the old Tory and
Pittite, Lord Sidmouth, to him, "God will forgive you on account of
this bill: I don't think I can." "Mark my words," was Earl Grey's
answer,--"within two years you will find that we have become unpopular
for having brought forward the most aristocratic measure that ever was
proposed in Parliament." The great Whig statesman was but half right.
The Whigs became unpopular within the time named, but it was for very
different reasons from that assigned by Earl Grey in advance for their
fall in the people's favor. The Reform Bill, instead of proving an
aristocratic measure, has wellnigh rendered aristocratical government
impossible in England; and as a democracy in that country is as much
out of the question as a well-ordered monarchy is in America, a return
to a true regal government would seem to be the only course left for
England, if she desires to have a strong government. When the Duke of
Wellington, seeing the breaking up of the old system because of the
triumph of the Whig measure, asked the question, "How is the King's
government to be carried on?" he meant, "How will it be possible to
maintain the old aristocratical system of party-government?"

Since the grand organic change that was effected thirty years ago,
there has been no strong and stable government in England. Lord Grey
went out of office because he could not keep his party together. The
King, under the spurring of his wife, made an effort to play the part
of his father in 1783, with Peel for Pitt, and was beaten. Peel was
floored, and Lord Melbourne became Premier again; and though he held
office six years, he never had a working majority in the Commons, nor
a majority of any kind in the Peers. The largest majorities that he
could command in the lower House would have been considered something
like very weak support in the ante-Reform times, and would have caused
the ministers of those times to resign themselves to resignation.
When the Tories came back to power, in 1841, with about one hundred
majority in the Commons, they thought they were secure for a decade
at least; but in a few months they found they were not secure of even
their own chief; and in five years they were compelled to abandon
protection, and to consent to the death and burial of their own party,
which was denied even the honor of embalmment, young Conservatism
being nothing but old Toryism, and therefore it was beyond even the
power of spices to prolong its decay. It had rotted of the potato-rot,
and the League's powerful breath blew it over. The Whigs returned
to office, but not to power, the Russell Government proving a most
ridiculous concern, and living through only five years of rickety
rule. A spasmodic Tory Government, that discarded Tory principles,
endured for less than a year, not even the vigorous intellect of the
Earl of Derby, seconded though it was by the genius of Disraeli, being
sufficient to insure it a longer term of existence. Then came the
Aberdeen Ministry, a regular coalition concern, a no-party government,
and necessarily so, because all parties but the extreme Tories were
represented in it, and were engaged in neutralizing each other. How
could there be a party government, or, indeed, for long a government
of any kind, by a ministry in which were such men as Aberdeen and
Russell, Palmerston and Grahame, Gladstone and Clarendon, all pigging
together in the same truckle-bed, to use Mr. Burke's figure concerning
the mixture that was called the Chatham Ministry? The coalition went
to pieces on the Russian rock, having managed the war much worse
than any American Administration ever mismanaged one. The Palmerston
Government followed, and has existed ever since, deducting the
fifteen months that the second Derby-Disraeli Ministry lasted; but the
Palmerston Ministry has seldom had a majority in Parliament, and has
lived, partly through the forbearance of its foes, partly through the
support of men who are neither its friends nor its enemies, and partly
through the personal popularity of its vigorous old chief, who is
as lively at seventy-eight as he was at forty-five, when he was a
Canningite. Ministries now maintain themselves because men do not know
what might happen, if they were to be dismissed; and this has been the
political state of England for more than a quarter of a century, with
no indications of a change so long as the government shall remain
purely Parliamentary in its character, Parliament meaning the House of
Commons. There is no party in the United Kingdom capable of electing a
strong majority to the House of Commons, and hence a strong government
is impossible so long as that body shall control the country. With the
removal of Lord Palmerston something like anarchy might be expected,
there being no man but him who is competent to keep the Commons in
order without the aid of a predominating party. The tendency has been
for some time to lean upon individuals, at the same time that
the number of individuals possessed of influence of the requisite
character has greatly diminished. Sir Robert Peel, had he lived, would
have been all that Lord Palmerston is, and more, and would have been
more acceptable to the middle class than is the Irish peer.

The state of things that is thus presented, and which must become
every year of a more pronounced character, is one that would be highly
favorable to the exertions of a prince who should seek to make himself
felt as the wielder of the sceptre, and who should exert himself to
rise from the presidency of an aristocratical corporation, which is
all that a British monarch now is, to the place of king of a great and
free people. A prince with talent, and with a hold on the affection of
his nominal subjects, might confer the blessing of strong government
on Britain, and rule over the first of empires, instead of being a
mere doge, or, as Napoleon coarsely had it, a pig to fatten at the
public expense. The time would appear to be near at hand when England
shall be the scene of a new struggle for power, with the aristocracy
on the one side, and the sovereign and most of the people on the
other. A nation like England cannot exist long with weakness
organized for its government, and there is nothing in the condition
of Parliament or of parties that allows us to suppose that from them
strength could proceed, any more than that grapes could be gathered
from thorns or figs from thistles. A monarch who should effect the
change indicated might be called a usurper, and certainly would be a
revolutionist; but, as Mommsen says, "Any revolution or any usurpation
is justified before the bar of history by exclusive ability to
govern,"--and government is what most nations now stand most in need
of. The reason why George III.'s conduct is generally condemned is,
that he was a clumsy creature, and that he made a bad use of the power
which he monopolized, or sought to monopolize, his whole course being
unrelieved by a single trait of genius, or even of that tact which is
the genius of small minds.


It has been charged upon the princes of the House of Hanover that they
are given to quarrelling, and that between sovereign and heir-apparent
there has never been good-will, while they have on several occasions
disgusted the world by the vehemence of their hatred for each other.
That George I. hated his heir is well known; and George II. hated his
son Frederick with far more intensity than he himself had been hated
by his own father. The Memoirs of Lord Hervey show the state of
feeling that existed in the English royal family during the first
third of the reign of George II., and the spectacle is hideous beyond
parallel; and for many years longer, until Frederick's death,
there was no abatement of paternal and filial hate. George III.
was disgusted with his eldest son's personal conduct and political
principles, as well he might be; for while the father was a model of
decorum, and a bitter Tory, the son was a profligate, and a Whig,--and
the King probably found it harder to forgive the Whig than the
profligate. The Prince cared no more for Whig principles than he did
for his marriage-vows, but affected them as a means of annoying his
father, whose Toryism was of proof. He, as a man, toasted the buff and
blue, when that meant support of Washington and his associates,
for the same reason that, as a boy, he had cheered for Wilkes and
Liberty,--because it was the readiest way of annoying his father; but
he ever deserted the Whigs when his aid and countenance could have
been useful to them. George IV. had no child with whom to quarrel, but
while Prince Regent he did his worst to make his daughter unhappy,
as we find established in Miss Knight's Memoirs. The good-natured
and kind-hearted William IV. had no legitimate children, but he was
strongly attached to the Fitzclarences, who were borne to him by Mrs.
Jordan. Indeed, monarchs have often been as full of love for their
offspring born out of wedlock as of hate for their children born in
that holy state. Being men, they must love something, and what
so natural as that they should love their natural children, whose
helpless condition appeals so strongly to all their better feelings,
and who never can become their rivals?

Queen Victoria is the first sovereign of the House of Hanover who,
having children, has not pained the world by quarrelling with them.
A model sovereign, she has not allowed an infirmity supposed to be
peculiar to her illustrious House to control her clear and just mind,
so that her career as a mother is as pleasing as her career as a
sovereign is splendid. About the time of the death of Prince Albert,
a leading British journal published some articles in which it was
insinuated, not asserted, that there had been trouble in the Royal
Family, and that that quarrelling between parent and child which
had been so common in that family in former times was about to
be exhibited again. It was even said that domestic peace was an
impossibility in the House of Hanover, which was but an indorsement
of Earl Granville's remark, in George II.'s reign. "This family," said
that eccentric peer, "always has quarrelled, and always will quarrel,
from generation to generation"; and he did not live to see the ill
feeling that existed between George III. and his eldest son.

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 with his son Eustace, when he
and Henry Plantagenet sought to restore peace to England, and nothing
but Eustace's death made a settlement possible. William Rufus, the Red
King, who was the second of the Norman sovereigns of England, had
no legitimate children, for he was never married. He was a jolly
bachelor, and as such he has had the honor of having his history
written by one of the ablest literary ladies of our time, Miss Agnes
Strickland. He was the only king of England, who arrived at years of
indiscretion, who did not marry. The other bachelor kings were Edward
V. and Edward VI., whose united ages were short of thirty years. His
character does not tend to make the single state of man respected.
"Never did a ruler die less regretted than William Rufus," says Dr.
Lappenberg, "although still young, being little above forty, not a
usurper, and successful in his undertakings. He was never married,
and, besides the crafty and officious tools of his power, was
surrounded only by a few Normans of quality, and harlots. In his last
struggle with the clergy, the most shameless rapacity is especially
prominent, and so glaring, that, notwithstanding some exaggerations
and errors that may be pointed out in the Chronicles, he still appears
in the same light. Effeminacy, drunkenness, gluttony, dissoluteness,
and unnatural crimes were the distinguishing characteristics of his
court. He was himself an example of incontinence." This is a nice
character to travel with down the page of history. He quarrelled with
his brothers, and with his uncle, and kept up the family character in
an exceedingly satisfactory manner, considering that he was unmarried.
The statement that he was slain by Walter Tirel, accidentally, in the
New Forest, is now disregarded. Our theory of his death is, that he
fell a victim to the ambition of his brother, Henry I., who succeeded
him, and who certainly had good information as to his fall, and made
good use of it, like a sensible fellow.