During the discussions on the Regency Bill, Lord Thurlow, who was then Lord Chancellor, acted the political rat, and coquetted with both parties. When the King's recovery was announced by the royal physicians, Thurlow, to cover his treachery, made an extravagant speech in defence of Pitt's views, and one laudatory of the King. After enumerating the rewards received from the King, he said, "and if I forget the monarch who has thus befriended me, may my great Creator forget me." John Wilkes, who was present in the House of Lords, said, in a stage aside, audible to many of the peers, "Forget you! he will see you damned first." Phillimore, describing Lord Chancellor Thurlow, says that he--"either from an instinctive delight in all that was brutal" (which did not prevent him from being a gross hypocrite), "or from a desire to please George III.--supported the Slave Trade, and the horrors of the Middle Passage, with the uncompromising ferocity of a Liverpool merchant or a Guinea captain." It appears that the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York exhibited what was considered somewhat indecent eagerness to have the King declared irrecoverably insane, and on more than one occasion the Queen refused to allow either of these Royal Princes access to the King's person, on the ground that their violent conduct retarded his recovery. The Prince of Wales and Duke of York protested in writing against the Queen's hostility to them, and published the protest. Happy family, these Brunswicks! Dr. Doran declares: "There was assuredly no decency in the conduct of the Heir-apparent, or of his next brother. They were gaily flying from club to club, party to party, and did not take the trouble even to assume the sentiment which they could not feel. 'If we were together,' says Lord Granville, in a letter inserted in his Memoirs, 'I would tell you some particulars of the Prince of Wales's behavior to the King and Queen, within these few days, that would make your blood run cold.' It was said that if the King could only recover and learn what had been said and done during his illness, he would hear enough to drive him again into insanity. The conduct of his eldest sons was marked by its savage inhumanity." Jesse says: "The fact is a painful one to relate, that on the 4th December--the day on which Parliament assembled, and when the King's malady was at its worst--the graceless youth (the Duke of York) not only held a meeting of the opposition at his own house, but afterwards proceeded to the House of Lords, in order to hear the depositions of the royal physicians read, and to listen to the painful details of his father's lunacy. Moreover the same evening we track both the brothers (the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York) to Brooks's, where in a circle of boon companions, as irreverent as themselves, they are said to have been in the habit of indulging in the most shocking indecencies, of which the King's derangement was the topic.