and stood at the door to see them off. When Lord Howe came over from Twickenham to see him, he said the queen was going out driving, and should “drop him” at his own house’ (ib. ii. 6). Greville is full of stories of a similar kind, and adds, ‘he ought to be made to understand that his simplicity degenerates into vulgarity, and that without departing from his natural urbanity he may conduct himself so as not to lower the character with which he is invested, and which belongs not to him but to the country’ (ib. ii. 12).
But he never did learn this, and continued to the end the same garrulous, homely, kind-hearted old man, fond of making speeches, which were generally uncalled for, and frequently absurd; fierce in his dislikes but not vindictive, and liable to wild bursts of passion, when what little dignity remained was thrown utterly to the winds. One of the most extraordinary of these happened within a year of his death. He had always disliked the Duchess of Kent, who, on her side, had not endeavoured to conciliate him. Of the duchess's daughter, the Princess Victoria, he was extremely fond, and one of his grievances was that her mother would not allow her to come to see him as often as he wished. The dislike came to a head in August 1836, when he discovered that the duchess had appropriated a suite of rooms in Kensington Palace, which he had categorically refused to allow her; and at Windsor, on the 21st, at a dinner of over a hundred people, to celebrate his birthday, he broke out in one of the wildest and most outrageous speeches that even he ever uttered; and that, with the duchess sitting next to him, in the post of honour, at his right hand. The Princess Victoria, who was present, burst into tears; the company broke up in dismay, and the duchess ordered her carriage. A sort of reconciliation was, however, patched up, and she consented to remain till the next day (ib. iii. 374–6).
Politically the conduct of affairs was, of course, in the hands of the successive administrations; and though it might have been supposed that he would resent the control which they exercised, quite as strongly as he had resented interference on board his frigate or at the admiralty, he did not do so. It would appear that in this case he really understood that the control was, in the very essence of the thing, inseparable from the position. He had, too, lived so long apart from politics that he can scarcely have had any very strong feeling, even on reform, which was the engrossing question of the early years of his reign. It would indeed appear that his personal opinion was in favour of it; he had, from his youth, interested himself in the condition of the poor (Nicolas, i. 294), and parliamentary reform may very well have seemed to him a step towards its amelioration. Thus, when, in November 1830, the Duke of Wellington resigned, the king accepted Lord Grey and the whigs, and their stipulation that reform should be a cabinet measure [see Grey, Charles, second Earl]. The Reform Bill, brought in on 1 March 1831, passed the second reading in the House of Commons by a majority of one (302 to 301) on the 22nd; and when, in committee, a hostile amendment was carried by a majority of eight, 19 April, Grey proposed an appeal to the country. The opposition, assuming that the king must be adverse to reform, deplored his weakness in ‘neglecting the opportunity to emancipate himself from the thraldom of the whigs.’ The king, however, considered that in calling on Grey to form a ministry, he had pledged himself to accept reform, and that the virtual dismissal of them would be a dishonest violation of an implied compact.
Parliament was dissolved on 22 April, and in the new House of Commons the Reform Bill was passed by a large majority on 22 Sept. It was, however, thrown out by the lords on 8 Oct.; but was brought in again and passed by the commons early in the next session, 22 March 1832. It was again rejected by the lords, and on the king's refusal to swamp the hostile majority by the creation of a large batch of peers, Grey resigned. The king appealed to Wellington, who was unable to form a ministry, and Grey returned to office on the understanding that the king would make the new peers if it should be found necessary. A circular letter from the king to the tory peers did away with the necessity; a hundred of them absented themselves from the divisions, and the bill became law. In other points in which, at the time, the king was blamed as having shown weakness or ignorance, it appears by later lights and, in particular by his own ‘Statement of his majesty's general proceedings, and of the principles by which he was guided from the period of his accession, 1830, to that of the recent change in the administration, 14 Jan. 1835’ (Stockmar, i. 314; Fitzgerald, ii. 331), drawn up for Sir Robert Peel, that he was really guided by constitutional principles and the feelings of an honourable gentleman; while his ex-
