His pursuit of the other great object of his domestic policy, the emancipation of trade from the shackles which impeded its universal development, was rudely interrupted by the pressure of the war forced upon him by that very nation which he had desired to make the first partner, if one may use such an expression, in the prosperity which he hoped to diffuse by his commercial treaty with her.

But, as in the case of other men in advance of their age, the principles which he had asserted were destined to bear fruit at a later period.

And the mere fact of a change in the person of the sovereign seemed to make a change in the policy hitherto pursued less unnatural.
Yet, memorable as the reforms which it witnessed were destined to make it, no reign ever commenced with more sinister omens than that at which we have now arrived.

The new King had not been on the throne a month, when a conspiracy was discovered, surpassing in its treasonable atrocity any that had been heard of in the kingdom since the days of the Gunpowder Plot; and, even before those concerned in that foul crime had been brought to punishment, the public mind was yet more generally and profoundly agitated by a scandal which, in one point of view, was still more painful, as in some degree involving the whole kingdom in its disgrace.
The marriage of the present sovereign to Mrs.Fitzherbert has already been mentioned.

A few years afterward, in the year 1795, regarding that marriage as illegal, he had contracted a second with his cousin, the Princess Caroline of Brunswick.