But not from his contemporaries. For himself and his troops the popular heart beat high with admiration and sympathy; and while the public hand scattered rewards in profuse showers upon the army, parliament increased the duke’s reward, and colleges offered him their presidential chairs. He was familiarly called ‘the Duke,’ as Marlborough had been before him, and as Wellington was after him. As he grew in manhood his heart became hardened; he had no affection for his family, nor fondness for the army, for which he had affected attachment. When his brother died, pleasure, not pain, made his heart throb, as he sarcastically exclaimed, ‘It is a great blow to the country, but I hope it will recover in time.’ The death, if it did not place him next to the throne, at least gave him hopes of being regent should his sire die before the young heir was of age. It was, however, the bloody Mutiny Act, of which he was really the author, which brought upon him the universal execration. ‘The penalty of death,’ says Walpole, ‘came over as often as the curses of the commination on Ash Wednesday.’ He who despised popularity was philosophically content when deprived of it. He was dissolute and a gambler. He hated marriage, and escaped from being united with a Danish princess by the adroit manœuvre of getting his friends to insist upon a large settlement from the royal father, too avaricious to grant it. If he was lashed into fury by his name being omitted from the Regency Bill, he was more sensitively wounded still, by being made to feel that English uncles had, before this, murdered the nephews who were heirs to the throne. He was incapable of the crime, for it could have profited him nothing. The knowledge, however, that popular opinion stigmatised him as being capable of committing an offence so sanguinary was a torture to him. One day, Prince George, his nephew, entered his room. It was a soldier’s apartment, hung with arms. He took down a splendid sword to exhibit it to the boy. The future husband of Charlotte turned pale, evidently suspecting that his uncle was on sanguinary thoughts intent. The duke was dreadfully shocked, and complained to the Princess-dowager of Wales that scandalous prejudices had been instilled into the child against him.