The Correspondence of King George the Third from 1760 to December, 1783 by JohnFortescueReview by: Randolph G. AdamsThe American Historical Review, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Apr., 1928), pp. 641-643Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1839417 .

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Fortescue: George III. 64I

While, even in his chapters of political narrative, Mr. Turberville intersperses his account with suggestive and informing reflections, as well as characterizations of the chief actors-vivified by quotations from Hervey and others-he has perforce to retell a story in the main familiar, even introducing-once or twice with apologies-various time-honored anecdotes. Although the Newcastle papers and a few other manuscript sources have been drawn on to a slight extent, the study is based largely on printed sources and the works of previous writers to whom ample acknowledgments are made. All that bears on the influence exerted by the peers, both inside and outside their chamber, has been carefully con- sidered and presented. In general the author takes a broad and open- minded view of things, though, in the opinion of the reviewer, he does not do full justice to the colonial attitude toward the Quebec Act. In estimating what can be said for and against the old system he takes oc- casion to note that we are not free even to-day from subtler forms of corruption and that tyranny of property is not the only kind to be appre- hended.

Actual errors seem to be remarkably few, although it is not correct to say that the right of a lord to be tried by his peers extended to mis- demeanors (p. 29); moreover, in relating the mighty achievements in the consumption of port, the uninitiated reader should be informed that the wine of that day was weaker and the bottles smaller than at present. Occasional phra'ses might be questioned, such as " the Lords had the best of the argument " (p. 50), and Lord Thurlow was " a poor lawyer " (p. 381), which makes one query momentarily whether he was indigent or lacking in legal capacity. The appendixes, which include a list of the peerage creations I702-1783, a critical discussion of reports of debates in the House of Lords, and a bibliography, are all useful. However, in the latter, W. L. Mathieson's Scotland and the Union and the works of Roylance Kent and Maurice Wood on the Tory party might possibly have been included.

ARTHUR LYON CROSS.

The Correspondence of King George the. Third from I760 to Decem- ber, I783. Arranged and edited by the Honorable Sir JOHN FORTESCUE, LL.D., D.Litt. Volumes I. and II., 176o-1773. (London: Macmillan. 1927. PP. xviii, 530; xvi, 532. 25 s. each.) THESE volumes constitute the first two of a six-volume set. Accord-

ing to their editor, they are " Printed from the Original Papers preserved in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle ", to which place they were re- stored in 1912, after having been lost for nearly a century. The obliga- tion of students of the eighteenth century to Sir John Fortescue can hardly be exaggerated. Apparently every scrap of paper has been printed. After a crisis such as the Cabinet upset of 1765, or the Stamp Act controversy, George III. would evidently sit down and try to write

AM. HIST. REV., VOL. XXXIlI.-42

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642 Reviews of Books

up what had happened. Dissatisfied with the draft, he would write an- other and then another-in which it would be difficult to say that the last was clearer than the first. Sir John prints them all, which, to the really minute investigator, is far more satisfactory than printing one draft and then indicating the variations. Of course one gets a view of Cabinet mneetings, with minutes, the strike of the Spitalfield weavers, the revolts of Irish whiteboys, the negotiations with Chatham, the Stamp Act and the Townshend Acts, the constant friction with France, Corsica and Gen- eral Paoli, the frequent changes of and in the ministry, Wilkes and the City of London, the domestic difficulties of the king and his family- all run together as the chronological sequence of the letters must dictate.

In reading through the documents, one can not but be struck with what a limited understanding of all the situations was possessed by the king and his correspondents. When a domestic revolt occurred (and George III. had his share of them) there was no question of: "What is the grievance? "; only a question of: " How can it be suppressed? ". Whig and Tory alike had no conception of what was really behind a mob of strikers. Yet it would be very wrong to draw from this the conclu- sion that George III. was heartless-a note on his per'sonal interest in commuting the sentence of a poor criminal from hanging to transporta- tion is an interesting sidelight on the king. America was a side-issue throughout the years represented in these volumes, and it would not be going too far to say that George III. and his friends knew as little of the real grievances of the colonists as they did of the strikers in England.

As source-material the private advices to the king of the debates in the houses of Parliament, the votes, the speeches, must ever be an inter- esting corrective of Hansard. One could wish that librarians would be willing to buy an extra set of this work and sandwich it in after the appropriate volume of Hansard-but possibly that is too much to ask of efficiency.

The cabinet changes in these volumes do not reflect the hostility of the king toward Chatham which afterward appeared. On the contrary, one is tempted to think that George III. was extraordinarily considerate of Chatham, and that Chatham, in view of the state of his health, had no right to hold up the course of business as often as he did when he knew that his physical condition prevented his attention to his work. In the affairs of the ever-absentee governor of Virginia, and of Shelburne, who was not always amenable to party discipline, one can not but think that George III. was quite right and Chatham quite wrong. A colony like Virginia could not at this critical time be governed by a man who sat in London and drew his pay, even if his name did happen to be Jeffery Amherst.

On the other hand the tragedy of the king's own health may be seen in the many letters on the Regency Bill. It is only by such a full pub- lication of such a quantity of documents that these finer, and often more significant points can be given their proportional importance.

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Stern: Ein fluss der Fr. Revolutionl 643

The editorial work is well done from the point of view of clearness. Certain material already printed in Donne's Correspondence of George III. and Lord North, Chatham Correspondence, and Grenville Papers, is reprinted-but this is clearly indicated, and the vast bulk of the documents have never before been printed.

One could wish that even though the editor found the differentiation of the various Grenvilles and Townshends a difficult matter, he had in- dicated his own guess as to which " Mr. Townshend " or " Mr. Grenville " wrote various letters designated. On the other hand, anyone who has ever done editorial work of this sort must appreciate the immensity of the task undertaken by Sir John Fortescue, and must be grateful for the documents which have been so long inaccessible.

RANDOLPH G. ADAMS.

Der Einfluss der Franz5sischen Revolution auf das Deutsche Geistes- leben. Von ALFRED STERN. (Stuttgart and Berlin: Cotta. 1928. Pp. 256. Unbounid, RM. 8.50; bound RM. Ii.5o.) THE veteran Zurich historian, best known by the ten volumes of his

European History from I8I5 to I87I, has assembled in this book a large amount of information upon the various reactions which the French Revolution produced upon leading German men of letters at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, including a number of prominent Swiss authors.

He gives telling instances of the enthusiasm evoked throughout greater Germany by the hopeful idealistic beginnings of 1789, singling out particularly such men as Wieland, Klopstock, the Stolbergs, Pestalozzi, Voss, Burger, Holderlin. He dwells in detail upon the experiences of certain German ideologists, notably Campe, Von Halem, Konrad Oelsner, Joseph G6rres, Georg Forster, whom an extreme cosmopolitan fervor in- duced to seek personal contact with the revolutionary leaders in Paris and, in the case of the last two, even misled into active participation in the Jacobin propaganda against Germany. On the other hand, he devotes a particularly instructive chapter to the theoretical opponents of the Revo- lution. In the main, these hostile criticisms are classified under three different heads: historical reasonings, popular propaganda of the nation- alistic sort, and emotional outbursts of men who from former admirers were turned by the September outrages into violent detractors. Under the first head are considered historical writers of the Gottingen school, such as Girtanner, Spittler, Heyne, Brandes, Rehberg, the last two largely influenced by Edmund Burke's famous Considerations. To these is added an analysis of Friedrich Gentz's defamatory pamphlets, likewise based upon Burke. Under the second head are emphasized the satirical Revoli- tions-Almanach. edited by the Gotha librarian Reichard and the Wiener Zcitschrift of the Austrian journalist Hoffmann, designed to "oppose a bulwark to the wild frenzy of cosmopolitan and philanthropic hordes ". Under the third, the chief interest centres, besides Klopstock's and

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