No sovereign was
ever penetrated with a more conscientious desire to do his duty to his
people. Conscious, perhaps, that his capacity was rather solid than
brilliant, he gave unremitting attention to the affairs of the nation in
every department of the government; and, perhaps not very unnaturally,
conceived that his doing so justified him, as far as he might be able,
in putting a constraint on his ministers to carry out his views. Thus,
he had notoriously induced Lord North to persevere in the late civil war
in America long after that minister had seen the hopelessness of the
contest; and it was, probably, only the knowledge of the strength of his
feelings on that subject, and of his warm attachment to that minister,
that caused the Parliament so long to withstand all the eloquence of the
advocates of peace, and the still stronger arguments of circumstances.
He might fairly think that he had now greater reason to adhere to his
own judgment; for Fox's recommendation of the Duke of Portland in
preference to Lord Shelburne was an act not only of unwarrantable
presumption, but of inconceivable folly, since there was no comparison
between the qualifications of the two men; and the coalition by which,
six months afterward, he had, as it were, revenged himself for the
rebuff, and had driven Lord Shelburne from office, was, as the King well
knew, and as even Fox's own friends did not conceal from themselves,
almost universally condemned out-of-doors.[79] To this combination,
therefore, his Majesty tried every expedient to escape from yielding.
And when Pitt's well-considered and judicious refusal of the government
left him no alternative but that of submission to Fox's dictation, it
would hardly have been very unnatural if his disposition and attitude
toward a ministry which had thus forced itself upon him had been those
attributed to him by Lord John Russell, of "an enemy constantly on the
watch against it."[80] But for some time that was not the impression of
the ministers themselves. In July, when they had been in office more
than three months, Fox admitted that he had never behaved toward them as
if he were displeased with them, and that he had no project of
substituting any other administration for the present one.[81] And his
temperate treatment of them was the more remarkable, because a flagrant
blunder of Burke (who filled the post of Paymaster), in reinstating some
clerks who had been dismissed by his predecessor for d