The immediate cause of that spirited disaster, the intervention of
England on behalf of the new Hohenzollern throne, was due, of course,
to the national policy of the first William Pitt. He was the kind of man
whose vanity and simplicity are too easily overwhelmed by the obvious.
He saw nothing in a European crisis except a war with France; and
nothing in a war with France except a repetition of the rather fruitless
glories of Agincourt and Malplaquet. He was of the Erastian Whigs,
sceptical but still healthy-minded, and neither good enough nor bad
enough to understand that even the war of that irreligious age was
ultimately a religious war. He had not a shade of irony in his whole
being; and beside Frederick, already as old as sin, he was like a rather
brilliant schoolboy.

But the direct causes were not the only causes, nor the true ones. The
true causes were connected with the triumph of one of the two traditions
which had long been struggling in England. And it is pathetic to record
that the foreign tradition was then represented by two of the ablest men
of that age, Frederick of Prussia and Pitt; while what was really the
old English tradition was represented by two of the stupidest men that
mankind ever tolerated in any age, George III. and Lord Bute. Bute was
the figurehead of a group of Tories who set about fulfilling the fine if
fanciful scheme for a democratic monarchy sketched by Bolingbroke in
"The Patriot King." It was bent in all sincerity on bringing men's minds
back to what are called domestic affairs, affairs as domestic as George
III. It might have arrested the advancing corruption of Parliaments and
enclosure of country-sides, by turning men's minds from the foreign
glories of the great Whigs like Churchill and Chatham; and one of its
first acts was to terminate the alliance with Prussia. Unfortunately,
whatever was picturesque in the piracy of Potsdam was beyond the