Riding in the park on an October day in 1760, a messenger delivered to the prince a note from the _valet de chambre_ of his grandfather, George II. The prince had coolly arranged with this valet, while yet the king seemed firm in health, that at the moment of the old man's death he should send him a note bearing a certain mark on the outside. The king, a vigorous old man of seventy-seven, fell dead in his closet at seven in the morning, and this note bore the preconcerted announcement of the fact. The moral and steady young man, quietly remarking to his groom that his horse was lame, turned about and gently rode back to Kew. Upon dismounting he said to the man, "I have said this horse is lame; I forbid you to say the contrary." At twenty-two years of age he was king. Except that he married, a few months after, a pliant, adoring German princess, his accession did not much change his mode of life. He still lived in strict seclusion, shut in against expanding influences, accessible at all times only to one man--him of the good legs and Jacobin mind, Bute, progenitor of the Pope's recent conquest, and Mr. Disraeli's hero, Lothair. [Illustration: Lord Bute, 1768.] [Illustration: Princess of Wales--Bute--George III.] In the caricatures of the next fifty years we see the ghastly results. His first important act was to repel from his counsels humiliating superiority in the person of William Pitt, the darling of the nation, the first minister of the world, and one of the three great orators of all time. In his stead ruled a long monotony of servile incompetents, beginning with Bute himself, continuing with Grenville, and coming at last to Addington and Eldon, the king keeping far from his confidence every man in England who had a gleam of public sense, or a touch of independent spirit, or even a sound traditionary attachment to Whig principles. An immovable obstructive to the true interest of his country at every crisis, honoring the men whom the better sense of the nation did not honor, and repressing the men whom wise contemporaries loved, and whom posterity with unanimous voice pronounces the glory of England in that age, he kept the country in bad humor during most of his reign, put her wrong on every question of universal interest, lost the most valuable and affectionate colonies a country ever had, kept Europe in a broil for twenty-five years, and developed Napoleon Bonaparte into a destructive lunatic by creating for him a succession of opportunities for the display of his talent for beating armies which had no generals. [Illustration: The Wire-master (Bute) and his Puppets. (London, 1767.) "The power behind the throne greater than the throne itself."]