All this told heavily upon poor King William, who was a good-natured sort of man in his own way if his ministers and others would only let him alone, and who rather fancied himself in the light of a popular sovereign. He therefore made up his mind at last to accept the advice {180} of his Whig ministers and grant them the power of creating as many new peers as they thought fit, for the purpose of passing their importunate Reform Bill. The consent was given at an interview which the King had with Lord Grey and Lord Brougham, Lord Brougham as keeper of the royal conscience taking the principal conduct of the negotiations on behalf of the Government. The King, as usual on such occasions, was flurried, awkward, and hot-tempered, and when he had made up his mind to yield to the advice of his ministers he could not so far master his temper as to make his decision seem a graceful concession. Even when he announced that the concession was to be made the trouble was not yet quite over. Lord Brougham thought it necessary to ask the King for his consent in writing to the creation of the new peers, and hereupon the wrath of the sovereign blazed out afresh. The King seemed to think that such a demand showed a want of confidence in him which amounted to something like an insult, and he fretted and stormed for a while as though he had been like Petruchio "aboard carousing to his mates." After a while, however, he came into a better humor, and perhaps saw the reasonableness of the plea that Lord Grey and Lord Brougham could not undertake the task now confided to them without the written warrant of the King's authority. William therefore turned away and scratched off at once a brief declaration conferring on his ministers the power to create the necessary number of peers, qualifying it merely with the condition that the sons of living peers were to be called upon in the first instance. The meaning of this condition was obvious, and its object was not unreasonable from the King's point of view, or, indeed, from the point of view of any statesman who was anxious that the House of Lords should be kept as long as possible in its existing form. Nobody certainly wanted to increase the number of peers to any great extent, and if only the eldest sons of the living peers were to be called to the House of Lords each would succeed in process of time to his father's title and the roll of the peerage would become once again as it had been before. {181} [Sidenote: 1832--Passage of the third Reform Bill]