But Kew was hardly again to welcome the Father of his People. Repeated agitations went to overthrow his reason for good--the triumphant marches of Napoleon, the tarnishing of British arms not yet brightened by Wellington’s victories, the misconduct and unpopularity of his sons, the death of his beloved youngest daughter, Amelia. At the beginning of 1811, George had just wits enough left to consent to the Prince’s Regency. A few months later, Charles Knight was one of the Windsor crowd that saw their aged Sovereign in public for the last time. Henceforth he lived confined in the Castle, prisoner of blindness, by and by of deafness, cheered by music, by religious exaltation, and by delusive memories of the past, more than by flitting glimmers of melancholy reason, in one of which he had the satisfaction of learning Napoleon’s downfall and the recovery of Hanover. A most pathetic figure was the blind old King with his white beard, only now and then visited by those nearest to him. It is said that the selfish Regent was moved to tears when one day he overheard his father murmuring the complaint of Milton’s Samson:-- O dark, dark, dark! Amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark! Total eclipse Without all hope of day! O first created Beam, and Thou, Great Word, “Let there be light! and light was over all,” Why am I thus bereaved Thy prime decree? When George III. was laid with his fathers in 1820, his stout-hearted and narrow-minded Queen had gone before him. To the last she tried to do her duty, according to her lights. Reconciled, at least outwardly, to her eldest son--indeed it appears that all along the strict moralist had something of woman’s weakness for that rake--she exerted herself to play the figurehead of his Court, taking the place of his discarded wife; and she shared his unpopularity to such an extent as to be hissed by the mob on her way to hold a Drawing-room; then, after the death of the Princess Charlotte, she had to face an outburst of popular resentment in the City. By the autumn of 1818 she was hopelessly prostrated by dropsy. On the way from London to Windsor her state became so serious that a halt was made at Kew Palace; and there she died in a chair, in the room now marked by a brass tablet, her last looks, it is said, fixed on a picture of _The Dropsical Woman_.