People From London

"The byproduct is sometimes more valuable than the product."

"One can know nothing of giving aught that is worthy to give unless one also knows how to take."

"The family only represents one aspect, however important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities...A life is beautiful and ideal, or the reverse, only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship."

"It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution."

"The text of the Bible is but a feeble symbol of the Revelation held in the text of Men and Women."

"Contrary to popular belief, English women do not wear tweed nightgowns."

"My family were of good English peasant class from St. John's Wood. My father dealt in stocks and shares and my mother also had a lot of time on her hands."

"When Reginald Iolanthe Perrin set out for work on the Thursday morning, he had no intention of calling his mother-in-law a hippopotamus."

"It was His Majesty's particular wish that as many of the old customs should be kept up as possible."

"Thousands were afterwards admitted into the chapel, to see the coffin and its splendid paraphernalia, as it lay in the tomb. Thus ended the most awful and magnificent ceremony which any British subject now living ever witnessed in this country; a ceremony, not merely adorned with all the appendages of grandeur which belong as matter of course to all royal funerals, but rendered sublime by the voluntary and heartfelt homage of countless thousands of affectionate subjects, who had thronged to the last obsequies of their King, not from the idle curiosity of seeing a grand exhibition, but to shed a last tear over the grave of a father and a friend."

"Though the regular course of the King's domestic living was so plain and unostentatious, he was not diminished to that appropriate show which is befitting a British Monarch, and which has always been displayed by our princes on particular occasions... He was a good antiquary in all that is material in books or prints, concerning the forms and order of our ancient state ceremonials; he regarded not so much the brilliancy, as the fitness of the symbols and attributes of royalty, for the time, place, and object."

"[T]hat so-called "break in the smooth development of our constitutional history" which, according to the familiar legend, was due to "the able attempt of George III to recover the powers of the Crown", etc. ... Professor Namier has shown that this legend is unfounded and that in reality George III carried on, to the best of his more than limited ability, the system of government which he had inherited from his predecessors."

"The crowds of people walking about the streets the whole of the day, after service time, were beyond anything I ever saw; but perfectly quiet, decent, and looking very cheerful... The number of people in the street, from Charing Cross the whole way to the [Merchant Taylors'] Hall, was immense, and the illuminations remarkably beautiful... The crowd, great as I have described it on our going, was become so immense as completely to fill the whole of the streets we passed through from side to side, and the carriage could only move at a foot's pace through the people; but all most perfectly quiet and civil; not an offensive word or insulting gesture... I can truly say I never saw before such a collection of people to give an idea from sight of the population of the metropolis; nor ever witnessed such perfect order and decorum in any great assemblage of the middling and lower order of the inhabitants of it."

"His Majesty added, that he had taken a positive determination not to admit Mr. Fox into his councils, even at the hazard of a civil war."

"From the beginning of his reign to the close of the American War, he was one of the most unpopular Princes that ever sat upon the throne: he is now one of the most popular... When the coalition between Lord North and Mr. Fox took place, the tide turned in his favour. A very general and very just indignation was excited in the public when they saw those two statesmen renouncing all their inveterate political animosities, and forming what seemed a confederacy against the nation... The King's joining the people on so important an occasion, against his Ministers and against the Parliament, laid the foundation of his popularity. Then followed an attempt upon his life by a maniac; then the irregularities and dissipation of the Prince destined to be his successor; next his own unfortunate derangement of mind, and the dread which the public entertained of the government which they saw about to take place, with the Prince for Regent, and for his Ministers the heads of the coalition, who had already claimed for him the Regency upon grounds the most unconstitutional; then his joyful recovery when it was least expected, which dispelled in a moment the gloom which hung over the country: and last of all, but which added tenfold strength to every motive of endearment to the King, the horrors of the French Revolution; the sufferings of the Royal Family, the debasement of the nobles, the confiscation of the property of the rich, the persecution of the clergy, the national bankruptcy, and all those various evils which it had produced, and which gave almost every description of persons who have any influence on public opinion an interest to adhere to, and maintain inviolably, our established Constitution, and, above all, the Monarchy, as inseparably connected with, and maintaining everything valuable in the State."

"The Jubilee seems to have been very happily celebrated everywhere. Nothing could be better than its effect in London, and the town appeared in the morning to be as quiet and orderly as could possibly be wished. The public offices and a few other buildings were illuminated, the mob were occupied the whole night in gaping at them, and cheering as any carriage passed by. The only exercise of their sovereign authority was compelling all the coachmen and servants to pull off their hats as they passed the illuminated crowd over the Admiralty gate."

"What I have never been able to find is the man arrogating power to himself, the ambitious schemer out to dominate, the intriguer dealing in an underhand fashion with his Ministers; in short, any evidence for the stories circulated about him by very clever and eloquent contemporaries."

"George III felt no prejudice against Americans. If he had the sense to pay them a visit, and had chased foxes in Virginia, shot quail in Carolina, and gone fishing with the Yankees, he might have won their hearts and possibly learned something about colonial quirks."

"George III, with ten years' experience as king, would have been called a "good guy" if he had lived in the twentieth century. He was more popular in Britain and America than any English monarch since Charles II. Sincerely religious, temperate in food and drink, he had an impeccable private life; he never indulged in the clumsy frolics to which male members of the house of Hanover have been prone. He loved manly sports and country life, rode boldly to hounds and ran his own farm. George was very methodical and conscientious in support of his public business. But of the quality of statesmanship to which kings were supposed to be born, he had none. His object was to substitute national leadership for party government, to rescue the crown from the clutches of leading Whig families, and to be his own prime minister. By 1770 George had got the hand of English politics and had become a manipulator second to none in the kingdom. He spent so much money sustaining Lord North's ministry and supporting "friendly" members of the House of Commons that the palace servants complained of not having enough to eat. In the general election of 1780 George spent the enormous sum of £104,000 to have the "right" people elected, and succeeded. It is not correct to say George III introduced a new system of government, or that he aimed at absolutism. He simply put himself at the head of the old Whig system and used it for what, rightly or wrongly, he believed to be the national interest. After several attempts to find a prime minister who would be responsible to him rather than the House of Commons, he got what he wanted in Lord North — and lost an empire. The other Whig factions did not catch on to what was going on for two or three years. By that time they had persuaded themselves that the King was trying to subvert the British constitution through corruption, and and set up a royal absolutism. This explains why Burke, Pitt, Richmond, and other leading Englishmen backed the colonies against their own government, and encouraged Americans to feel that they were fighting for liberty in England as well as America."

"The king had shown himself to be stolid, courageous, and beneficent in 1786, when he was confronted with the knife-brandishing Margaret Nicholson. This incident left a potent and enduring picture of good King George entreating the crowd: "The poor creature is mad! Do not hurt her! She has not hurt me!" The king also provided his subjects with countless affecting images of a devoted patriarch; whenever he appeared in public he always seemed to have children in tow. Moreover, he allowed his subjects access to the royal family's domestic rituals: walks, gardening, visiting, swimming at Weymouth. Court functions became wholesome and family oriented... George increasingly became identified with the bumbling, well-meaning John Bull. The predominant attitude of the prints shifted from hostility to good-natured amusement."

"Namier and his followers have little to say about the American revolutionists but devote themselves to scolding the English Whigs... By the same token the righteousness of the Americans is somewhat diminished through the loss of the principal villain in the contest. George III is no longer the foe of liberty, seeking to subvert the British constitution, but an earnest and responsible monarch, doing his job to the best of his abilities. And those abilities, we are told, while not of the highest order, were not small either. George, in fact, becomes a sympathetic figure, and one can scarcely escape the feeling that the Americans were rather beastly to have made things so hard for him."

"The majority of men who took up arms during the "popular uprising" phase of the war in 1775-1776 were not fighting for independence, but for their rights as Englishmen within the Empire. Although a growing number believed independence inevitable, most maintained allegiance to George III, who, they assumed, was being misled by corrupt ministers conspiring to enslave the colonies. Congress insisted that the colonies were only protecting themselves form these conspirators, that reconciliation would occur as soon as the King restrained his advisers."

"The British populace at home was not united behind the war because some people doubted its wisdom and justness. One result of the antiwar sentiment was difficulty in recruiting troops, a difficulty aggravated by George III's reluctance to incur the huge expenses necessary to expand the army. To fill the ranks, England hired German soldiers, collectively known as Hessians, and sent almost 30,000 of them to America. But Hessians alone were insufficient, and England also enlisted slaves, mobilized Indians, and depended on Loyalist soldiers. England still suffered manpower shortages, and these expedients were also partially counterproductive. Hiring mercenaries, using slaves, inciting "savages" and fomenting a civil war within a civil war heightened colonial disaffection."

"George III had been twenty-two when, in 1760, he succeeded to the throne, and to a remarkable degree he remained a man of simple tastes and few pretensions. He liked plain food and drank but little, and wine only. Defying fashion, he refused to wear a wig. That the palace at St. James's had become a bit dowdy bothered him not at all. He rather liked it that way. Socially awkward at Court occasions—many found him disappointingly dull—he preferred puttering about his farms at Windsor dressed in farmer's clothes. And in notable contrast to much of fashionable society and the Court, where mistresses and infidelities were not only an accepted part of life, but often flaunted, the King remained steadfastly faithful to his very plain Queen, the German princess Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenberg-Streilitz, with whom he had now produced ten children. (Ultimately there would be fifteen.) Gossips claimed that Farmer George's chief pleasures were a leg of mutton and his plain little wife. But this was hardly fair, Nor was he the unattractive, dim-witted man critics claimed then and afterward. Tall and rather handsome, with clear blue eyes and a generally cheerful expression, George III had a genuine love of music and played both the violin and the piano. (His favorite composer was Handel, but he adored also the music of Bach and in 1764 had taken tremendous delight in hearing the boy Mozart perform on the organ.) He loved architecture and did quite beautiful architectural drawings of his own. With a good eye for art, he had begun early to assemble his own collection, which by now included works by the contemporary Italian painter Canaletto, as well as watercolors and drawings by such old masters such as Poussin and Raphael. He avidly collected books, to the point where he had assembled one of the finest libraries in the world. He adored clocks, ship models, took great interest in things practical, took great interest in astronomy, and founded the Royal Academy of Arts."

"The amusements which the satirist ridiculed, when he told of a monarch "Who rams, and ewes, and lambs, and bullocks fed," were pursuits congenial to the English taste, and not incompatible with the most diligent performance of public duty. The daubs of the caricaturist provoked no contempt for "Farmer George and his Wife." The sneers of the rhymester at "sharp and prudent economic kings,"—at the parsimony which prescribed that at the breaking up of a royal card party "the candles should be immediately blown out,"—fell harmless upon Windsor ears."

"My early familiarity with the person of George III might have abated something in my mind of the divinity which doth hedge a king; but it has left an impression of the homely kindness of his nature, which no subsequent knowledge of his despotic tendencies, his cherished political hatreds, and his obstinate prejudices as a sovereign, can make me lay aside. There was a magnanimity about the man in his forgetfulness of the petty offences of very humble people, who did not come across his will, although they might appear indiscreet or even dangerous in their supposed principles."

"Sir, his manners are those of as fine a gentleman as we may suppose Lewis the Fourteenth or Charles the Second."

"Sir, they may talk of the King as they will; but he is the finest gentleman I have ever seen."

"Did the rapid expansion bring a rush of blood to the heads of the British elite? One can put it that way. Certainly, over the next two decades, the characteristic British values of caution, pragmatism, practical common sense and moderation seemed to desert the island race, or at any rate the men in power there. There was arrogance, and arrogance bred mistakes, and obstinacy meant they persisted in to the point of idiocy. The root of the trouble was George III, a young, self-confident, ignorant, opinionated, inflexible, and pertinacious man, determined to be an active king, not just in name, like his grandfather George II, but in reality. George II, however, was a sensible man, well aware of his considerable intellectual and constitutional limitations. He had employed great statesmen, when he could find them, like Sir Robert Walpole and William Pitt the Elder, who had helped make Britain the richest and most successful nation in the world. George III employed second-raters and creatures of his own making, more court-favorites or men whose sole merit was an ability to manage a corrupt House of Commons. From 1763 to 1782, by which time the American colonies had been lost, it would be hard to think of a more dismal succession of nonentities than the men who, as First Lords of the Treasury (Prime Minister), had charge of Britain's affairs—the Earl of Bute, George Grenville, the Marquis of Rockingham, the Duke of Grafton, and Lord North. And behind them, in key jobs, were other boobies like Charles Townshend and Lord George Germaine."

"We I hope shall be left free to avail ourselves of the advantages of neutrality: and yet much I fear the English, or rather their stupid king, will force us out of it. (...) Common sense dictates therefore that they should let us remain neuter: ergo they will not let us remain neuter. I never yet found any other general rule for foretelling what they will do, but that of examining what they ought not to do."

"he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers; is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another."

"For the most trifling reasons, and sometimes for no conceivable reason at all, his majesty has rejected laws of the most salutary tendency. The abolition of domestic slavery is the great object of desire in those colonies where it was unhappily introduced in their infant state. But previous to the infranchisement of the slaves we have, it is necessary to exclude all further importations from Africa. Yet our repeated attempts to effect this by prohibitions, and by imposing duties which might amount to a prohibition, have been hitherto defeated by his majesty's negative: thus preferring the immediate advantages of a few British corsairs to the lasting interests of the American states, and to the rights of human nature deeply wounded by this infamous practice."

"Although simple in his manners and pursuits in private life, yet in his royal character he was partial to shew and pageantry. There were few sovereigns who knew better how to support the state of royalty, or who, when occasion required, could divest himself of it, and fall, as it were, into the rank of a private gentleman."

"To us, the offspring of his reign, therefore, the death of an aged Monarch is as if the paternal roof had fallen in, and left our chambers desolate."

"The United States, for example, has never had a President as bad as George III, but neither has Britain had a king as admirable as George Washington (of whom William Thackeray rightly said that 'his glory will descend to remotest ages' while the memory of the sovereign went the other way). However, George was not too bad. Still, even to concede this obvious argument is to make it plain that a bad monarch is at least as likely as a bad president even given the caprice of random selection by the hereditary principle... We find that the presidency has become too secretive, too powerful, too trammeled, too ceremonial, too impotent or too complicated, depending on the president under discussion or the critic making the analysis. On one thing all are agreed - there is a danger of an 'imperial' or 'monarchical' presidency. An incumbent in Washington knows he is in trouble on the day that cartoonists begin to represent him as a king."

"Caesar had his Brutus, Charles I his Cromwell, and George III may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it."

"In the perplexity of nations, the throne of the King of England was the only one unshaken, and its stability was the work of his virtue."

"At the time you succeeded the late Mr. Pitt, being in waiting on my late revered and beloved royal master, I one day repaired to Buckingham House for the usual morning ride. Soon after the King was on horseback he called me to come nearer to him, when he said, "I have not had any sleep this night, and am very bilious and unwell." I replied, "I hoped his ride would do him good." He then told me it was in consequence of Mr. Pitt's applying to him to consent to Catholic emancipation. On our arrival at Kew he ordered me to attend him to the library; and when there, asked me if I knew where to find his coronation oath. I said, "In Blackstone;" but I think I found it in Burnet's History of the Reformation. I was commanded to read it to him, which I did, and then followed quickly an exclamation, "Where is that power on earth to absolve me from the due observance of every sentence of that oath, particularly the one requiring me to 'maintain the Protestant reformed religion?' Was not my family seated on the throne for that express purpose? And shall I be the first to suffer it to be undermined, perhaps overturned? No; I had rather beg my bread from door to door throughout Europe than consent to any such measure." These words I am ready to attest if called upon, and am of opinion they ought to be written in letters of gold."

"At the end of 1783, George III was forty-five years old, and he had been twenty-three years on the throne. Corpulent, voluble, energetic, sharing many of the leading tastes of the time – a scientific farmer, a keen collector, a devotee of music – he was a model, in a dissolute age, of simple domestic virtue. His Court was remarkably free of scandal, he was faithful to his Queen, he had just had his fifteenth child, he preferred a modest life at Kew or Buckingham House to the splendours of a palace. The fashionable world found him rather ridiculous, and inexpressibly dull: his careful habits preserved a sanctum from the world to which duty called. For duty was the keynote of George III's existence; it sustained his every effort, it was the rock on which he built."

"The King is really prepared to take the field in case of attack, his beds are ready and he can move at half an hour's warning."

"Not all the Opposition Members were so foolish or extreme, but in the King's mind all were traitors. George III grew stubborn and even more intent. He closed his ears to moderate counsel and refused to admit into his Government those men of both parties who, like many American Loyalists, foresaw and condemned the disasters into which his policy was tottering and were horrified at the civil war between the Mother Country and her colonies. Even Lord North was half-hearted, and only his loyalty to the King and his sincere old-fashioned belief, shared by many politicians of the day, that a Minister's duty was to carry out the personal wishes of the sovereign stopped him from resigning much sooner than he did. Though technically responsible as First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, he had no grip on the conduct of affairs and allowed the King and the departmental Ministers to control the day-to-day work of government. George III tirelessly struggled to superintend the details of the war organisation, but he was incapable of co-ordinating the activities of his Ministers. These were of poor quality. The Admiralty was headed by Wilke's comrade in debauch, the Earl of Sandwich. His reputation has been mauled, but recent research has shown that at least the Fleet was in much better condition than the Army. Rarely has British strategy fallen into such a multitude of errors. Every maxim and principle of war was either violated or disregarded."

"The personality of George III was now exercising a preponderant influence upon events. He was one of the most conscientious sovereigns who ever sat upon the English throne. Simple in his tastes and unpretentious in manner, he had the superficial appearance of a typical yeoman. But his mind was Hanoverian, with an infinite capacity for mastering main principles. He possessed great moral courage and an inveterate obstinacy, and his stubbornness lent weight to the stiffening attitude of his Government. His responsibility for the final breach is a high one."

"The temper of the new ruler was adverse. George III had very clear ideas of what he wanted and where he was going. He meant to be King, such a King as all his countrymen would follow and revere. Under the long Whig regime the House of Commons had become an irresponsible autocracy. Would not the liberties of the country be safer in the hands of a monarch, young, honourable, virtuous, and appearing thoroughly English, than a faction governing the land through a packed and corrupt House of Commons? Let him make an end of government by families, choose his own ministers and stand by them, and end once and for all the corruption of political life. But in such a monarchy what was the place for a man like Pitt, who owed nothing to corruption, nothing to the Crown, and everything to the people and to his personal domination of the House of Commons? So long as he was in power he would divide the kingdom with Caesar. He could not help it. His profound reverence for the person and office of George III could not conceal from either of them the fact that Pitt was a very great man and the King a very limited man."

"George III alienated the people of his American colonies by his tyrannical behavior, provoking them to take up arms to win their independence. The first of the Hanoverian kings to be born in England, George III was generally slow-witted: he certainly exhibited extraordinarily bad judgment when it came to picking prime ministers."

"The fault of his constitution, he said, was a tendency to excessive fat, which he kept, however, in order, by the most vigorous exercise, and the strictest attention to a simple diet. When Mrs. Delany was beginning to praise his forbearance, he stopped her. "No, no," he cried, "’tis no virtue; I only prefer eating plain and little, to growing diseased and infirm.""

"I have only to assure you, from accurate observation, that the personal popularity of the King is as great as it possibly can be; and if anything had been wanting to add to that popularity, the circumstance of his owing his present malady to his parental feelings for his daughter, has given the people a still greater veneration and affection for him than they had before."

"His popularity is very great, for the mass of people look up to his good moral character, and to his age, and to a comparison with his sons."

"The monarchy had little to fear from pseudo-Jacobins plotting a revolution on the French model. So long as it could command the confidence of the propertied classes it was in no danger. To do this it must conform to their ideals in politics and in morals. This King George understood well. The Crown must pay its way; it must be conservative, but not opposed to change when change was the will of the nation; and it must set an example of duty and religious observance. These precepts were forgotten during the reigns of the King's two successors when the prestige of the Crown reached its nadir... By reverting to the precepts of King George III Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort restored the prestige of the Crown. If we would wish to know what King George would have been like had he lived in the days of Peel and Palmerston, we have but to study the conduct of the Prince Consort. There is the same devotion to duty, frugality, concern for religion and morality, interest in the arts and science, which won for the Crown the confidence of the middle class. In ideals and precepts, though not in character, the Prince Consort might have been a reincarnation of the King. King George III was the first of the Victorians."

"[A] Prince, who has, at once, displayed a most ardent and steady attachment to the Constitution, and exhibited a most exemplary pattern of Religious and moral excellence—a Prince whose piety, and whose virtues, combined with a manly firmness and consistency of character, have been for years the grand bulwark, not only of this country, but of the whole civilized world. If at such a time the British Throne had been deficient in any one of the qualities by which it has been so eminently distinguished, it is more than probable that every Religious and social establishment would, ere now, have been laid in the dust, and that an atheistical band of sanguinary anarchists, would, at this moment, have been triumphing upon the ruins of civil Society."

"[I]t will be our especial duty, as good subjects and good Englishmen, to reverence the crown, and yet guard against corrupt and servile influence from those who are intrusted with it's authority; to be loyal, yet free; obedient, and yet independent: and, above every thing, to hope that we may long, very long, continue to be governed by a sovereign, who, in all those public acts that have personally proceeded from himself, hath manifested the highest veneration for the free constitution of Britain; hath already in more than one instance remarkably strengthened it's outworks; and will therefore never harbour a thought, or adopt a persuasion, in any the remotest degree detrimental to public liberty."