Charles Bradlaugh

“ And when, in the London Chronicle and Cambridge Intelligencer, and other journals by no means favorable to Ireland or its people, we read the horrid stories of women ravished, men tortured, and farms pillaged, all in the name of law and order, and this by King George's soldiers, not more than seventy years ago, can we feel astonishment that the Wexford peasants have grown up to hate the Saxon oppressor? ”

“ I have only pleaded against the White Horse of Hanover. I admire the German intellect, training the world to think. I loathe these small German breast-bestarred wanderers, whose only merit is their loving hatred of one another. In their own land they vegetate and wither unnoticed; here we pay them highly to marry and perpetuate a pauper prince-race. If they do nothing, they are "good." If they do ill, loyalty gilds the vice till it looks like virtue. ”

“ Parliament has admittedly the right to deprive a living King of his Crown, and to treat a Prince of Wales as having no claim to the succession.
In point of fact two of the clauses of the Act of Settlement were repealed in the reign of Queen Anne, and a third clause was repealed early in the reign of George I., showing that this particular statute has never been considered immutable or irrepealable. It is right to add that the clauses repealed were only of consequence to the nation, and that their repeal was no injury to the Crown. ”

“ He gathered round his throne that great party, who, clinging to the tradition of the past, have always made it their boast to check the progress of their age. During the sixty years of his reign, he, with the sole exception of Pitt, never willingly admitted to his councils a single man of great ability: not one whose name is associated with any measure of value, either in domestic or foreign policy. ”

“ The Government distributors of stamps were either forced to return to England, or were obliged to renounce publicly and upon oath their official employment; and, when the matter was again brought before the English House of Commons, Pitt denied the right of Parliament to levy taxation on persons who had no right to representation, and exclaimed: "I rejoice that America has resisted; three millions of people so dead to all feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of all the rest." ”

“ And when, unhappily for his own fame, this great man determined to return to power, he could only recover office by conceding that very point for which he had relinquished it; thus setting the mischievous example of the minister of a free country sacrificing his own judgment to the personal prejudices of the reigning sovereign. As it was hardly possible to find other ministers who to equal abilities would add equal subservience, it is not surprising that the highest offices were constantly filled with men of notorious incapacity. ”

“ That in consequence of the incompetence or want of desire for governmental duty on the part of the various reigning members of the House of Brunswick, the governing power of the country has been practically limited to a few families, who have used government in the majority of instances as a system of machinery for securing place and pension for themselves and their associates; while it is submitted that government should be the best contrivance of national wisdom for the alleviation of national suffering and promotion of national happiness. ”

“ Charles James Fox, who now came into power for a brief space, had, says Jesse, "taught himself to look upon his sovereign as a mere dull, obstinate, half-crazed, and narrow-minded bigot; a Prince whose shallow understanding had never been improved by education, whose prejudices it was impossible to remove, and whose resentments it would be idle to endeavor to soften." ”

“ There have been four Princes of Wales since the death of Anne, and all four have gone into bitter opposition." "That family," said Lord Carteret one day in full Council, "always has quarrelled, and always will quarrel, from generation to generation."
"Through the whole of the reign of George I., and through nearly half of the reign of George II.," says Lord Macaulay, "a Tory was regarded as the enemy of the reigning house, and was excluded from all the favors of the Crown. Though most of the country gentlemen were Tories, none but Whigs were appointed deans and bishops. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In 1777, during this American war, Earl Chatham, in one of his grand speeches, after denouncing "the traffic and barter driven with every little pitiful German Prince that sells his subjects to the shambles of a foreign country," adds: "The mercenary aid on which you rely, irritates to an incurable resentment the minds of your enemies, whom you overrun with the sordid sons of rapine and of plunder, devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! ”

“ Sir Francis Burdett said, "that to have a person at the head of affairs who had long been incapable of signing his name to a document without some one to guide his hand; a person long incapable of receiving petitions, of even holding a levee, or discharging the most ordinary functions of his office, and now afflicted with this mental malady, was a most mischievous example to the people of this country, while it had a tendency to expose the Government to the contempt of foreign nations." ”

“ In order to crush out the spirit of liberty in the American colonies, the Government of George III., in February, 1776, hired 17,000 men from the Landgrave and Hereditary Prince of Hesse Cassel, and from the Duke of Brunswick. Besides these, there were levies of troops out of George III.'s Hanoverian dominions, and that nothing might be wanting to our glory, the King's agents stirred up the Cherokee and Creek Indians to scalp, ravish, and plunder the disaffected colonists. ”

“ Her Majesty is now enormously rich, and—as she is like her Royal grandmother—grows richer daily. She is also generous, Parliament annually voting her moneys to enable her to be so without touching her own purse.
It is charged against me that I have unfairly touched private character. In no instance have I done so, except as I have found the conduct of the individuals attacked affecting the honor and welfare of the nation. My sayings and writings are denounced in many of the journals, and in the House of Lords, as seditious, and even treasonable. ”

“ In impeaching the Brunswicks, we remind the people of proclamations officially issued in the King's name, threatening to burn and devastate whole parishes, and we allege that the disaffection in Ireland at the present moment is the natural fruit of the utter regardlessness, on the part of these Guelphs, for human liberty, or happiness, or life. The grossest excesses were perpetrated in Ireland by King George III.'s foreign auxiliaries. The troops from Hesse Cassel, from Hesse Darmstadt, and from Hanover, earned an unenviable notoriety by their cruelty, rapacity, and licentiousness. ”

“ Every liberal sentiment, everything approaching to reform, nay, even the mere mention of inquiry, was an abomination in the eyes of that narrow and ignorant Prince. Without knowledge, without taste, without even a glimpse of one of the sciences, or a feeling for one of the fine arts, education had done nothing to enlarge a mind which nature had more than usually contracted. ”

“ George, Prince of Wales, declared himself not guilty of bigamy; the Duke of York declared himself not guilty of selling promotion in the army. Both these Princes publicly declared themselves not guilty of the charge of trying to hinder their royal father's restoration to sanity. The Duke of Kent, the Queen's father, declared that he was no party to the subornation of witnesses against his own brother. The Duke of Cumberland pledged his oath that he had never been guilty of sodomy and murder. ”

“ That the terrible French war—of which it is impossible to give any account in the limits of this essay, a war which cost Great Britain at least £1,000,000,000 in hard cash, without reckoning the hundreds of thousands of killed, wounded, and pauperized, and which Buckle calls "the most hateful, the most unjust, and the most atrocious war England has ever waged against any country"—directly resulted from our government under the Brunswick family is a point on which it is impossible for any one who has examined the facts to have a serious doubt. ”

“ Alike incapable of fear and foresight, he would have risked the integrity of the United Kingdom rather than concede the Catholic claims; and the whole Monarchy rather than sanction Reform. It would be easy to suggest a parallel, and not always to his advantage, between the constitution of his mind and that of James, Duke of York, afterwards James II., whose obstinate bigotry forced the nation to choose between their liberties and his deposition from the Throne. ”

“ The Duke of York's address to his brother peers closed with the declaration that he would, to the last moment of his life, whatever his situation, resist the emancipation of the Catholics, "so help him God!" All tyrants think themselves immortal; the Catholics and their cause outlived the Duke of York, and triumphed. His speech, however, coming from the presumptive heir to the Crown, had a great share in deciding the majority of the Lords against the measure ”

“ Parliament is usually opened and closed by commission—a robe on an empty throne, and a speech read by deputy, satisfying the Sovereign's loyal subjects. It is, however, the fact that in real State policy her interference has been most mischievous, and this especially where it affected her Prusso-German relatives.' In the case of Denmark attacked by Prussia and Austria, and in the case of the Franco-Prussian War, English Court influences have most indecently affected our foreign relations. ”

“ On the 2d of October, 1741 (the Pelham family having managed to acquire power by dint, as Lord Macaulay puts it, of more than suspected treason to their leader and colleague) , the Duke of Newcastle, then Prime Minister, wrote his brother, Henry Pelham, as follows: "I must freely own to you, that I think the King's unjustifiable partiality for Hanover, to which he makes all other views and considerations subservient, has manifested itself so much that no man can continue in the active part of the administration with honor." ”

“ It is evident from Miss Burney's diary that the King and Queen warmly championed the cause of Warren Hastings, who, after a wearisome impeachment, was acquitted.
In 1788, the King's insanity assumed a more violent form than usual, and on a report from the Privy Council, the subject was brought before Parliament. In the Commons, Pitt and the Tory party contended that the right of providing for the government of the country in cases where the monarch was unable to perform his duties, belonged to the nation at large, to be exercised by its representatives in Parliament. ”

“ How William IV. could ever have been suspected of being favorable to Reform is difficult to comprehend. As Duke of Clarence he had spoken in favor of the Slave Trade, and had declared that "its abolition should meet with his most serious and most unqualified opposition." When the Reform Bill actually became law, although William IV. did not dare to veto it, he refused to give the royal assent in person. ”

“ It is a sufficient refutation of such a calumny to say that the Duke of Cumberland was as brave a soldier and as able a general as our present Commander-in-Chief, his Royal Highness the Duke of Cambridge.
Lord Waldegrave, who wrote in favor of George II., admits that the King "is accused by his ministers of being hasty and passionate when any measure is proposed which; he does not approve of." That "too great attention to money seems to be his capital failing." ”

“ In January, 1833, in a speech, not written for him, but made extemporaneously after dinner, William IV. said, to compliment the American Ambassador, "that it had always been a matter of serious regret to him that he had not been born a free, independent American." We regret that the whole family have not long since naturalized themselves as American citizens. But such a sentiment from the son of George III., from one who in his youth had used the most extravagant phraseology in denunciation of the American rebels!! ”

“ In 1794, the debts of the Prince of Wales then amounting to about £650,000, not including the amounts due on the foreign bonds, a marriage was suggested in order to give an excuse for going to Parliament for a vote. This was at a time when the Prince was living with Mrs. Fitzherbert as his wife, and when Lady Jersey was his most prominent mistress. The bride selected was Caroline of Brunswick. A poor woman for a wife, if Lord Malmesbury's picture is a true one, certainly in no sense a bad woman. ”