This was suddenly changed in April, when it was brought home to the nation that the specter of war had again been raised, and that the dynasties were finally a unit in their determination to extirpate the Napoleonic regime as a measure of self-defense. Every man with any means saw himself beggared, and every mother felt her son slipping from her arms to swim once more that sea of blood in which for a generation the hope of the nation had been submerged. The depression was general and terrible, for the prospect was appalling. England, entangled with dynastic alliances in order to preserve her prosperity and dignity, had lost most of her serious and trusted leaders, and the few who survived were so panic-stricken as to have little perspicacity. The King's illness having at last removed him from public life, he had been succeeded by the most profligate and frivolous of all the line of English kings, the Prince Regent, who was later George IV. Percival and Liverpool were not merely conservative from principle; they were negative from the love of negatives. Already they had laid the basis, in their mismanagement of domestic affairs, for the social turbulence which within a short time was to compel the most sweeping reforms. Castlereagh had not even an inkling of what the treaty of Chaumont might mean to Great Britain in the end. To destroy Napoleon he was perfectly content that his own free country should support a system of dynastic politics destructive of every principle of liberty.