Let us consider for a moment the character of the Sovereign whom Pitt had set himself to bait.
George II. was first and fundamentally a German prince of his epoch. What other could he be? And these magnates all aped Louis XIV. as their model. They built huge palaces, as like Versailles as their means would permit, and generally beyond those limits, with fountains and avenues and dismally wide paths. Even in our own day a German monarch has left, fortunately unfinished, an accurate Versailles on a damp island in a Bavarian lake. In these grandiose structures they cherished a blighting etiquette, and led lives as dull as those of the aged and torpid carp in their own stew-ponds. Then at the proper season, they would break away into the forest and kill game. Moreover, still in imitation of their model, they held, as a necessary feature in the dreary drama of their existence, ponderous dalliance with unattractive mistresses, in whom they fondly tried to discern the charms of a Montespan or a La Vallière. This monotonous programme, sometimes varied by a violent contest whether they should occupy a seat with or without a back, or with or without arms, represented the even tenor of their lives.
George II. was better than this training would suggest. His first ambition indeed was to be a Lovelace, but his second was to be a soldier. As a soldier he had the unaffected courage of the princes of his race. George, red and angry, fighting on foot at the battle of Dettingen, is a figure that is memorable and congenial to his British subjects.
As a Lovelace he lives to this day, for his portraits are generally in the posture of a coxcomb, with his face in outline wearing an irresistible smile, only comical to the beholder now, but with which he goes smirking into the eternities. It is not necessary to dwell on this part of his character; after all, a shallow part, for the one woman whom he loved was his wife. It was, however, a necessary part, vital to his conception of an ideal monarch. His confidences to his wife on this delicate point, though gross to us, seemed natural to him and to her, and were probably not alien to the atmosphere in which he was reared. Withal he bored his mistresses to death, and not impossibly they bored him. But that did not matter; the thing had to be done; he saw himself as in a mirror the fourteenth or fifteenth Louis; and when on the Saturdays in summer he drove down with Lady Yarmouth and his court to Richmond, escorted by Lifeguards kicking up the dust, to walk an hour in the garden, dine, and return to London, he imagined himself, as Horace Walpole tells us, the most gallant and lively prince in Europe![144]