Before long the staff of preceptors fell all by the ears, the high officials quarrelling with the sub-tutors, who were understood to be in more favour with the mother. The former complained of Stone as taking too much on himself; and as for Scott, Horace Walpole tells a wicked story of the Bishop turning him out of the Prince’s Chamber “by an imposition of hands that had at least as much of the flesh as of the spirit.” What brought these jars to light was the Bishop finding in the Prince of Wales’s hands a French book written to justify James II.’s measures, an offence which Stone tried to palliate by making out that this Jacobite treatise had been lent the Prince by his sister, to whom, one understands, it would do no such great harm. The end of it was that both Governor and Preceptor resigned their offices, replaced by Lord Waldegrave and the Bishop of Peterborough, who appear to have got on for a time more smoothly with the subordinate instructors, as with the family. The new Bishop, said their mother, gave great satisfaction, and the children took to him. Lord Waldegrave, by his own account, became no favourite with his most important pupil, and had a poor opinion of him. His Memoirs scout the Princess’s professions that she did not interfere in the boys’ education. The preceptors had little influence, he says; “the mother and the nursery always prevailed.” The Prince he sets down as obstinate, sulky, too stingy and too self-righteous for his years. George, for his part, is afterwards found recalling this Governor as a “depraved, worthless man.” What seems most certain as to George III.’s education is that he learned very little from books, not even to spell, but that he came to speak French and German, and that he allowed his mother and her friend, if not his tutors, to stamp the theory that a king of England should not only reign but govern, upon a nature that proved wax to receive and marble to retain such impressions. The mother spoke of George as a good, dutiful boy, rather serious in his disposition than otherwise, but a little wanting in spirit. Whether at her apron-string he grew up sly as well as shy and sleepy, is a question raised by the story of his youthful amour with a Quakeress named Hannah Lightfoot, which makes the plot of one of Besant’s novels; but it is hard now to tell the truth of it. The idea one gets of this King’s youth suggests Blifil rather than Tom Jones. All the other sons turned out more like Tom Jones, while “insipid” was an epithet applied to young George, who would yet develop a strongly-flavoured character. His moral courage and pluck came to be well proved in several trying predicaments; and at the opening of the Seven Years’ War, he showed spirit by demanding to serve in the Army, to the King’s jealous displeasure.