On the 19th December, 1783, William Pitt, then twenty-four years of age, became Prime Minister of England. The House of Commons passed a resolution, on the motion of Lord Surrey, remonstrating with the King for having permitted his sacred name to be unconstitutionally used in order to influence the deliberations of Parliament. More than once the Commons petitioned the King to dismiss Pitt from office. Pitt, with large majorities against him, wished to resign; but George III. said, "If you resign, Mr. Pitt, I must resign too," and he again threatened, in the event of defeat, to abandon England, and retire to his Hanoverian dominions. Now our monarch, if a king, would, have no Hanoverian dominions to retire to.
In 1784, £60,000 was voted by Parliament to defray the King's debts. In consequence of the large debts of the Prince of Wales, an interview was arranged at Carlton House, on the 27th April, 1785, between the Prince and Lord Malmesbury. The King, the Prince said, had desired him to send in an exact statement of his debts; there was one item, however, of £25,000, on which the Prince of Wales would give no information. If it were a debt, argued the King, which his son was ashamed to explain, it was one which he ought not to defray. The Prince threatened to go abroad, saying, "I am ruined if I stay in England. I shall disgrace myself as a man; my father hates me, and has hated me since I was seven years old.... We are too wide asunder to ever meet. The King has deceived me; he has made me deceive others. I cannot trust him, and he will not believe me." And this is the Brunswick family to which the English nation are required to be blindly loyal!
In 1785, George, Prince of Wales, was married to a Roman Catholic lady, Mrs. Fitzherbert, a widow. It is of course known that the Prince treated the lady badly. This was not his first experience, the history of Mary Robinson forming but one amongst a long list of shabby _liaisons_. A question having arisen before the House of Commons, during a discussion on the debts owing by the Prince, Charles James Fox, on the written authority of the Prince, denied that any marriage, regular or irregular, had ever taken place, and termed it ah invention.... destitute of the slightest foundation. Mr. Fox's denial was made on the distinct written authority of the Prince, who offered, through Fox, to give in the House of Lords the "fullest assurances of the utter falsehood" of the allegation; although not only does everybody know to-day that the denial was untrue, but in point of fact the fullest proofs of the denied marriage exist at this very moment in the custody of Messrs. Coutts, the bankers. Out of all the Brunswicks England has been cursed with, George I. is the only one against whom there is no charge of wanton falsehood to his ministers or subjects, and it is fairly probable that his character for such truthfulness was preserved by his utter inability to lie in our language.