We must admit then that he was born and bred a coxcomb, like his son. That he was a fond father no one will allege. His pleasures were coarse and dull. Even here one strange exception must be made. His letters to women, in the opinion of hostile critics, were tender and even exquisite.[145] How he came to write them we cannot know, for his character could not make one expect a grace of this kind.
In other respects we think him underrated. Sir Robert Walpole said that politically he was a coward. To what does this charge really amount? That a prince who had never left Germany till he was thirty-one, who succeeded to the throne when he was forty-four, after a life of such severe repression that his father even entertained the idea of transporting him to the plantations, should display that familiarity with his position, his political relations, and a strange nation, which alone could justify the independent action which is implied by the phrase 'political courage,' would have been astonishing; it would indeed have savoured of political recklessness. Walpole may have uttered the charge in resentment for some refusal of the King's. He was, we know, irritated at the moment by finding that the King had promised to go to Hanover without informing him. The King no doubt blustered in private when he yielded in public. But domestic effervescence was the only method of relief for a Sovereign who knew his own limitations, and who also knew that, constitutionally, he would have at last to yield to his Minister. What is 'political courage' in a constitutional Sovereign? What would Walpole have said had the monarch shown 'political courage' and insisted on having his own stubborn way? 'Had he,' wrote Waldegrave, with his usual good sense, 'always been as firm and undaunted in the Closet as he showed himself at Oudenarde and Dettingen, he might not have proved quite as good a king in this limited monarchy.'
His foible, we are told, was avarice. We do not know that he was mean in his personal expenditure. Waldegrave, again, who was fair, and knew him better than most men, declared that 'he was always just, and sometimes charitable, though rarely generous.' He amused himself, we are told, with counting his guineas in private. That perhaps was not a very royal occupation, though a nursery rhyme indicates that it is; it may have been a trick learned when he was poor, or it may have been his substitute for those games of anxious futility now known as 'patience.' But the real ground for the charge of avarice in the eyes of his British subjects was that he accumulated a great treasure in Hanover. If that be avarice, it was the avarice of the kings who made Prussia, the famous Frederick and his father. Parsimony in such cases may well be a virtue; and subjects may even prefer to be ruled by those who possess it rather than by princes who rear vast and idle palaces like the Bourbons of Spain and Naples, or live with unbridled extravagance like George IV. But kings rarely hit the right mean; if they are generous they are called profuse, if they are careful they are called mean. George's avarice, if such it was, was a public-spirited avarice. He hoarded for his own beloved country, he got as much out of his Kingdom as he could for his Electorate; for he was a Hanoverian first and a Briton a long way afterwards. But when Hanover needed it, he spent all his hoards on her behalf ungrudgingly, and died poor.