temptation to be dishonest, having married a wife who brought him £25,000 a year and nearly a quarter of a million in the funds, the fact must not be ignored that many of those who plunged their hands into the country's purse were possessed of greater wealth.

CHAPTER IX

THE COURT OF GEORGE III

EVEN before he ascended the throne George III had determined that his Court should be very different from that of his grandfather, and when he came into his kingdom he began at once a very drastic process of purification. He was a religious man, somewhat narrow in his views, and he held sacred things in great respect. At the coronation, after he had been anointed and crowned, when the Archbishop of Canterbury came to hand him down from the throne to receive the Sacrament, he told them he would not go to the Lord's Supper and partake of that ordinance with the crown on his head. The Archbishop of Canterbury did not know if it might be removed, and, after consulting the Bishop of Rochester, told the King neither could say if there was any order in the service for receiving communion with or without the crown. "Then there ought to be," said the monarch, and himself laid aside the crown.1 Indeed he

1 "The coronation is over, 'tis even a more gorgeous sight than I imagined," Horace Walpole told the Hon. Henry Seymour Conway. "I saw the procession and the hall; but

held very strong views as to the Sacrament, and when in 1805 Lord Chesterfield' prior to an Installation asked if the new Knights of the Garter would be required to take it, "No, My Lord," he replied severely," the Holy Sacrament is not to be profaned by our Gothic institutions. Even at my coronation I was very unwilling to take it, but they told me it was indispensable. As it was, I took off the bauble from my head before I approached the Altar." 2

George had this deep feeling for religion from his childhood, and before he was six years old had without direction learnt by heart several pages of Doddridge's "Principles of the Christian Religion"; while, from the time he grew up to the

the return was in the dark. In the morning they had forgot the sword of state, the chairs for the King and Queen, and their canopies. They used the Lord Mayor's sword for the first, and made the last in the hall; so they did not set forth till noon; and then, by a childish compliment to the King, reserved the illumination of the hall till his entry, by which means they arrived like a funeral, nothing being discernible but the plumes of the Knights of the Bath, which seemed the hearse." Indeed, the whole was a comedy of errors, crowned by the historic apology of the Earl Marshal, Lord Effingham, in reply to the King's complaints: "It is true, sir, there has been some neglect, but I have taken care that the next coronation shall be regulated in the exactest manner possible."

1 Philip Stanhope, fifth Earl of Chesterfield (1755-1815). 2 Wraxall: Historical Memoirs of My Own Times.