George I, at the time of his accession to the English throne in 1714 fifty-four years of age, was a German. He continued to be a German The early prince, more concerned with his electorate of Hanover than with his new kingdom. He did not understand a word of English and, as his ministers were similarly ignorant of German, he was compelled to resort to a dubious Latin when he wished to communicate with them. He was king from 1714 to 1727, and was followed by his son, George II, who ruled from 1727 to 1760 and who, though he knew English, spoke it badly and was far more interested in his petty German principality than in imperial Britain.
The first two Georges, whose chief interest in England was the money they could get out of it, therefore allowed their ministers to carry on the government and they did not even attend the meetings of the ministers where questions of policy were decided. For forty-six years this royal abstention continued. The result was the establishment of a regime never seen before in any country. The royal power was no longer exercised by the king, but was exercised by his ministers, who, moreover, were members of Parliament. In other words, to use a phrase that has become famous, the king reigns but does not govern. Parliament really governs, through a committee of its members, the ministers.
The ministers must have the support of the majority party in Parliament, and during all this period they, as a matter of fact, relied upon the party of the Whigs. It had been the Whigs who had carried through the revolution of 1688 and who were committed to the principle of the limitation of the royal power in favor of the sovereignty of Parliament. As George I and George II owed their throne to this party, and as the adherents of the other great party, the Tories, were long supposed to be supporters of the discarded Stuarts, England entered upon a period of Whig rule, which steadily undermined the authority of the monarch. The Hanoverian kings owed their position as kings to the Whigs. They paid for their right to reign by the abandonment of the powers that had hitherto inhered in the monarch.
The change that had come over their position did not escape the attention of the monarchs concerned. George II, compelled to accept ministers he detested, considered himself 'a prisoner upon the throne.' "Your ministers, Sire," said one of them to him, "are but the instruments of your government." George smiled and replied, "In this country the ministers are king."
Besides the introduction of this unique form of government the other great achievement of the Whigs during this period was an extraordinary increase in the colonial possessions of England, the real launching of Britain upon her career as a world the British power, as a great imperial state. This sudden, tremendous expansion was a result of the Seven Years' War, which raged from 1756 to 1763 in every part of the world, in Europe, in America, in Asia, and on the sea. Many nations were involved and the struggle was highly complicated, but two phases of it stand out particularly and in high relief, the struggle between England and France, and the struggle between Prussia on the one hand and Austria, France, and Russia on the other. The Seven Years' War remains a mighty landmark in the history of England and of Prussia, its two conspicuous beneficiaries.
England found in William Pitt, later Earl of Chatham, an incomparable leader, a great orator of a declamatory and theatrical type, an incorruptible statesman, a passionate patriot, a man instinct with energy, aglow with pride and confidence in the splendor of the destinies reserved for his country. Pitt infused his own energy, his irresistible driving power into every branch of the public service. Head of the ministry from 1757 to 1761, he aroused the national sentiment to such a pitch, he directed the national efforts with such contagious and imperious confidence, that he turned a war that had begun badly into the most glorious and successful that England had ever fought. On the sea, in India, and in America, victory after victory over the French rewarded the nation's extraordinary efforts. Pitt boasted that he alone could save the country. Save it he surely did. He was the greatest of war ministers, imparting his indomitable resolution to multitudes of others. No one, it was said, ever entered his office without coming out a braver man. His triumph was complete when Wolfe defeated Montcalm upon the Plains of Abraham.
By the Peace of Paris, which closed this epochal struggle, England acquired from France disputed areas of Nova Scotia, all of Canada, and the region between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi Paris River, and also acquired Florida from Spain. From France, too, she snatched at the same time supremacy in India. Thus England had become a veritable world-empire under the inspiring leadership of the 'Great Commoner.' Her horizons, her interests, had grown vastly more spacious by this rapid increase in military renown, in power, in territory. She had mounted to higher influence in the world, and that, too, at the expense of her old historic enemy, just across the Channel.
But all this prestige and greatness were imperiled and gravely compromised by the reign that had just begun. George III had, in 1760, come to the throne which he was not to leave until claimed by death sixty years later. "The name of George III," writes one English historian, "cannot be penned without a pang, can hardly be penned without a curse, such mischief was he fated to do the country." Unlike his two predecessors, he was not a German, but was a son of England, had grown up in England and had been educated there, and on his accession, at the age of twenty-two, had announced in his most famous utterance that he "gloried in the name of Briton." But wisdom is no birthright, and George III was not destined to show forth in his life the saving grace of that quality. With many personal virtues, he was one of the least wise of monarchs and one of the most obstinate.
His mother, a German princess, attached to all the despotic notions of her native land, had frequently said to him, " George, be a king." This maternal advice, that he should not follow the example of the first two Georges but should mix actively in public affairs, fell upon fruitful soil. George was resolved not only to reign but to govern in the good old monarchical way.
This determination brought him into a sharp and momentous clash with the tendency and the desire of his age. The historical significance of George III lies in the fact that he was resolved to be the chief directing power in the state, that he challenged the system of government which gave that position to Parliament and its ministers, that he threw himself directly athwart the recent constitutional development, that he intended to break up the practices followed during the last two reigns and to rule personally as did the other sovereigns of the world. As the new system was insecurely established, his vigorous intervention brought on a crisis in which it nearly perished.
George III, bent upon being king in fact as well as in name, did not formally oppose the cabinet system of government, but sought to make the cabinet a mere tool of his will, filling it with men who would take orders from him, and aiding them in controlling methods of Parliament by the use of various forms of bribery and influence. It took several years to effect this real perversion of the cabinet system, but in the end the King absolutely controlled the ministry and the two chambers of Parliament. The Whigs, who since 1688 had dominated the monarch and had successfully asserted the predominance of Parliament, were gradually disrupted by the insidious royal policy, and were supplanted by the Tories, who were always favorable to a strong kingship and who now entered upon a period of supremacy which was to last until well into the nineteenth century.
After ten years of this mining and sapping the King's ideas triumphed in the creation of a ministry which was completely submissive to his will. The ministry of which Lord North was the leading member, lasted twelve years, from 1770 to 1782. Lord North was a minister after the King's own heart. He never pretended to be the head of the government, but accepted and executed the King's wishes with the ready obedience of a lackey. The royal autocracy was scarcely veiled by the mere continuance of the outer forms of a free government.
Having thus secured entire control of ministry and Parliament, George III proceeded to lead the British Empire straight toward destruction, to what Goldwin Smith has called "the most tragical disaster in English history." The King and his tools initiated a policy which led swiftly and inevitably to civil war. For the American Revolution was a civil war within the British Empire. Party divisions were much the same in the mother country and in the colonies, Whigs versus Tories, the upholders of the principle of self-government against the upholders of the principle of the royal prerogative. In this appalling crisis, not only was the independence of America involved, but parliamentary government as worked out in England was also at stake. Had George III triumphed not only would colonial liberties have disappeared, but the right of Parliament to be