No scruple as to kingly dignity restrained George III from endeavouring to profit by the glamour that surrounds the throne. "I am sorry to find the Attorney-General (Thurlow) rather retracts. I feel the propriety of keeping him in his present situation; and if any kindness from me on Wednesday can effect it, you may rest assured he shall be got into thorough good temper," he wrote to North on June 7, 1774; and on another day, "The last division was nearer than some persons will have expected, but not more than I thought. I hope every engine will be employed to get those friends that stayed away last night to come and support on Monday. I wish a list could be prepared of those who went away, and those that deserted to the minority. _That would be a rule for my conduct in the Drawing-room to-morrow._"[102] "I am so desirous that every man in my service should take part in the Debate on Tuesday," he wrote again on January 7, 1770, "that I desire you will very strongly press Sir G. Elliot and any others that have not taken a part last session. I have no objection to your adding that I have particularly directed you to speak to them."[103] "I consent," he wrote on April 21, 1775, "to Sir Watkin Williams (Wynn) being Lieutenant of Merioneth, _if he means to be grateful_, otherwise favours granted to persons in opposition is not very political."[104] [102] _Correspondence of George III with Lord North._ [103] _Ibid._ [104] _Ibid._ George made it quite clear that to attack the Government or vote against it was regarded by him as a personal insult, and he was determined that no man should do so with impunity. "Lord North's attention in correcting the impression I had that Colonel Burgoyne and Lieutenant-Colonel Harcourt were absent yesterday is very handsome to those gentlemen, for I certainly should have thought myself obliged to have named a new Governor in the room of the former, and to have removed the other from my Bedchamber,"[105] he wrote on March 12, 1772, in reference to a division on the Royal Marriage Act; and when the Prime Minister suggested that Chatham's pension should be settled in reversion on his younger son, William Pitt: "The making Lord Chatham's family suffer for the conduct of their father is not in the least agreeable to me," he replied, on August 9, 1775. "But I should choose to know him to be totally unable to appear again on the public stage before I agree to any offer of that kind, lest it should wrongly be construed into a fear of him; and indeed his political conduct the last winter was so abandoned, that he must, in the eyes of the dispassionate, have totally undone all the merit of his former conduct. As to any gratitude to be expected from him or his family, the whole tenor of their lives has shown them void of that most honourable sentiment. But _when decrepitude or death puts an end to him as a trumpet of sedition_, I shall make no difficulty in