oning, if only because of the immense difference
between the accepted usages of that time and any usages that would be
possible in our days. King William shortly after his accession created
his eldest son Earl of Munster, and conferred upon all his other sons
and daughters the rank that belongs to the younger children of a
marquis. The King's living children, as has been said before, were all
illegitimate. In raising them to the rank of the peerage King William
was only following the example of many or most of his predecessors.
People thought none the less of him, at the time, because he had
bestowed such honor upon his progeny. Charles Greville, the famous
Clerk of the Council to George the Fourth and William the Fourth,
describes the new sovereign with characteristic frankness and lack of
reverence. "Altogether," says Greville, writing about a fortnight
after the King's accession, "he seems a kind-hearted, well-meaning, not
stupid, burlesque, bustling old fellow, and if he doesn't go mad may
make a very decent king, but he exhibits oddities."

The early bringing-up of the new King had certainly not tended much to
fill him with the highest aspirations or to qualify him for the most
dignified duties of royalty. "Never," says Greville, "was elevation
like that of King William the Fourth. His life has hitherto been
passed in obscurity and neglect, in miserable poverty, surrounded by a
numerous progeny of bastards, without consideration or friends, and he
was ridiculous from his grotesque ways and little, meddling curiosity."

{115}

He appears to have been a man of rather kindly, and certainly not
ungenerous, disposition, and it is decidedly to his credit, in one
sense, that the expectations of most of the Whigs were disappointed
when he came to the throne. During his career in the Navy he had a way
of disregarding orders, and when in command of a squadron would
sometimes take his own vessel on an expedition according to his own
fancy, and leave the remainder of the vessels under his charge to do as
well as they could without him until it pleased him to return. Some of
his later exploits in this way drew down on him a marked expression of
disapproval from the Duke of Wellington, then at the head of the
Government, and for this reason it was thought by many, when William
came to the throne, that he would be sure to dismiss from his service
the Prime Minister who once had offended him so deeply. A man with a
mo