[p. 581]
|581| to his throne, the disgrace of a guarantee of its Charter, much less that this people had called upon them for this last humiliation of itself. – The Württemberg estates, too, have, as goes without saying, never received an answer to their letters to those three powers.
The king, in a decree of 27 July, had the estates made aware of the inexplicability of their conduct, and left it to them, if it served their reassurance, to appoint a double or triple number of deputies; he postponed the term of the prorogation to the 28th, in order to leave the assembly time once more for reflection. On the 28th it produced yet another broad address like the preceding ones, in a tone of contentious spite and evil embitterment which contrasts greatly with the tone of dignified bearing, calm simplicity and restriction to the essential in the royal resolutions; – the expression at the close of the address, that through this prorogation an incurable rift between the king and the country had been brought on, an assembly of estates should never have permitted itself. – It now dispersed.
This evil bitterness, can it have had a share in the touching proofs of gratitude of the people (among others, in one of the last sittings, in a serenade)? One might have thought that only the rabble could have taken pleasure in it and have found its self-esteem in it. It had no power over the king to keep him from convoking the estates again; rather he refuted their conduct, which was to hold not to the matter and his declared will but chiefly to their own imputations of intentions, by convoking them again for 16 October of the same year. If the ministry, even before the first convocation, had been able to find it most improbable that nothing salutary would be accomplished with such material as, for an assembly of estates,
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