"[166] There were
at this time general and apparently well-founded hopes of the King's
recovery. For at intervals during the whole of January the
Prime-minister had interviews with his Majesty; and, on the very day on
which the bill became law, the King himself mentioned it to Lord Eldon,
the Chancellor, and said that he acquiesced in it from perfect
confidence in the advice of his physicians, and on the sound judgment
and personal attachment of his ministers.
For the present, therefore, no change was made in the administration;
but when, in the spring of the following year, Mr. Perceval was
murdered, the necessity for a new arrangement which this strange and
calamitous atrocity forced upon the Regent--who by this time had come
into possession of his full authority--led to his making offers of the
conduct of affairs to more than one prominent statesman, all of them, as
is somewhat remarkable, being peers. And, though the proposals
eventually came to nothing, and the negotiations terminated in the
re-establishment of the former ministry, with Lord Liverpool at its
head, yet some of the causes to which their failure was publicly or
generally attributed seem desirable to be recorded, because the first,
and that most openly avowed, bears a not very distant resemblance to the
complication which baffled Sir Robert Peel's endeavors to form an
administration in 1839; and another corresponds precisely to a proposal
which, in 1827, the Regent--then King George IV.
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