A forgotten Prince of Wales

We now pass from the Prince’s political and financial entanglements to the softer theme of his love, or rather loves, for alas! there were several of them!

This subject, however, cannot be entered upon without a reference to one of two great ladies whose personalities overshadowed St. James’s at the time of Frederick’s coming to England. These were the Duchesses of Marlborough and Buckingham, near neighbours and rivals, one living at Buckingham House, which, as before stated, had been built amid a grove of trees celebrated for its singing birds—the site of the present Buckingham Palace—the other occupying a house bearing her name on the other side of the Park, which was pulled down to make room for the present Marlborough House, up till recently the residence of the Prince of Wales.

These two great ladies lived in fair amity, but had their little differences like the rest of womankind, of which the following incident is a fair sample.

The Duchess of Buckingham had had the misfortune to lose her son, who had died in Rome, and whose body she caused to be brought to England for sepulture in Westminster Abbey.

She sent across the Park to the widowed Duchess of Marlborough to borrow the hearse or funeral car on which the body of the great Duke had been borne to the grave some years before.

Sarah of Marlborough, in her none too refined manner, refused her request in the following terms:

“It carried my Lord Marlborough,” she replied, “and it shall never be used for any meaner mortal.”

This was hardly a consoling message to send to a sorrowing mother, but her Grace of Buckingham rose to the occasion even in her grief:

“I have consulted the undertaker,” she rejoined, “and he tells me I can have a finer for twenty pounds.”

The two seem to have outrivalled one another in pride and arrogance, and both affected to despise the House of Hanover, though they at times dissembled and attended the drawing-rooms “over the way,” which they considered doing the King and Queen an exceeding honour, and perhaps it was.

Both were enormously wealthy, she of Buckingham posing as an adherent of the House of Stuart, and no doubt using some of her wealth to support it, although it is said that she was mean enough to allow the pall covering the unburied coffin of James the Second in Paris to fall into rags, though she was in the habit of going there to weep over it.

“I believe I may sometime or other have complained of Sir Robert Walpole’s treatment of me,” observed Sarah Duchess of Marlborough to her friend and dependent Dr. Hare in one of her letters, “but I never went through with it, believing that it was not easy to him.”

If the Duchess had reason to complain of that distinguished statesman in that month of August, 1726, in which she wrote, she had considerably more reason to do so a few years later, when he wrecked one of her pet schemes as completely as he had that of Her Majesty the Queen of Prussia concerning Prince Frederick, which latter endeavour had, perhaps, set the brains of the astute Sarah working on the very same subject.

The Duchess was, as it has been said, enormously rich, powerful, and, in addition, exceedingly ambitious, so enterprising, indeed, in this latter respect that she made a bold bid to make her grand-daughter, Lady Diana Spencer, Queen Consort of England. It came about in this wise:

Though the Prince of Wales had established himself as a kind of power by his alliance with Bolingbroke and his party, yet he had gained nothing by it financially.

The King remained perfectly obdurate on the subject of increasing his allowance, and meanwhile the sum of the Prince’s debts mounted higher and higher.

The story of the Prince’s embarrassments very soon travelled across that little space of thoroughfare dividing St. James’s Palace from Marlborough House, and reached the ever open ears of the Duchess Sarah, always ready to hear any news from “over the way” the residence of “neighbour George” as she was in the habit of calling him.

The wily old Duchess must have brooded long before she took her next step; old diplomatiste as she was, it was a matter that could not have been entered upon without the deepest thought. It was about the boldest step “Sarah Jennings” had ever taken. When she had settled the matter in her mind, she sent a message to the Prince of Wales and asked him to favour her with an interview.

No record of this most interesting meeting has, unfortunately, been preserved; one would have liked to have seen a detailed account of it in Doddington’s diary, but there is nothing of it there.

There is no doubt, however, what was the nature of the interview; the wonderful old stateswoman there and then offered the Prince her favourite grand-daughter Lady Diana Spencer in marriage, and with her the sum of one hundred thousand pounds, which she no doubt calculated would come in very handy to the Prince in his involved condition.

It is necessary to make a comparison between the status of Lady Diana and that of the lady—the daughter of a petty German Prince—whom the Prince eventually married to understand that the Duchess’s offer was not by any means so outrageous as one would imagine. Indeed, there are those who think that Lady Diana’s birth and position, combined with her wit and beauty, were far superior to those of the German Princess. Lady Diana was the youngest daughter of Charles, Earl of Sunderland, by Anne, daughter of the great Duke of Marlborough and Sarah his wife, and was undoubtedly a young lady of exceptional wit and beauty.

Although there is strong evidence to prove that the Prince had not forgotten his love for his cousin, the Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia, yet he accepted the Duchess of Marlborough’s offer. Some say it was to annoy his royal father and mother—things had reached that stage by then—others said as they naturally would say, Lord Hervey, the Queen’s confidant and really a bitter enemy of her son the Prince, no doubt among the number, that the hundred thousand pounds put into the scale against the Prince’s debts decided the matter, but possibly the young lady’s bright eyes—she was evidently a consenting party—and the persuasions and arguments of the experienced Duchess had something to do with it, at any rate the marriage was arranged to take place secretly in the Duchess’s lodge in Windsor Park, and was to be celebrated by her private chaplain. The very day was fixed.

If the old Duchess had acquired the vulgar habit of rubbing her hands, there is no doubt she did so over this matter, for it promised a repayment of old debts and slights which had been heaping up interest for years.

No Royal Marriage Act existed or had been thought of at that time, and Lady Diana would have been the Prince’s lawful wife in the face of all England beyond question if the ceremony had taken place, but this time the Duchess Sarah had counted without her host, she had either left out of her calculations or ignored a very important personage indeed, viz., Sir Robert Walpole.

It is not at all surprising, when we consider the extraordinary little space which divided the residences of the two young people, that the fact that there was marriage in the air, and that a Royal one to boot, should creep out. Perhaps a confidential maid let the secret out—for there must have been a great question of dresses going on—or the young Prince betrayed it in a burst of confidence over a bowl—he was very good at drinking bon pères as we know—to some boon companion, but at any rate it reached the ears of Sir Robert Walpole, and Sir Robert stretched out his hand—and the arm belonging to it was a long one and could reach all over England and even across the Channel to foreign parts—and behold! the Royal Marriage Scheme of the great Sarah crumbled and was no more. “Sir Robert Walpole was able to prevent the marriage,” history records.

It must have been a dangerous act to have approached Her Grace of Marlborough during the few days following upon her disappointment. History gives us no information as to what she remarked upon the frustration of her hopes at the time, neither is it recorded what course Lady Diana’s grief took at the disappointment. It is safe to assert that both ladies had a “good cry” in private; but how the old Duchess of Buckingham must have chuckled over it!

Lady Diana evidently soon dried her tears, and apparently took the matter as lightly as the Prince did, for very shortly after she became the Duchess of Bedford, viz., on October 12th, 1731, but, unfortunately, died young (on the 27th of September, 1735). But the great Duchess Sarah was not of the nature to forget Sir Robert Walpole’s part in this affair, and it is interesting to read her opinion of him written to Lord Stair in her old age; this opinion was written by the Duchess avowedly for the use of future historians.

“In another book,” she writes, “are a great many particulars which the historian may like to look into; but I have omitted these to relate something of Sir Robert Walpole, which shows that he betrayed the Duke of Marlborough, even at a time when he made the greatest professions to him.

“The Duke of Marlborough was made so uneasy at the end of the Queen’s reign, by turning men of service out of the Army to put in Mr. Hill and Mr. Masham over the heads of people improperly, that Mr. Walpole was employed to show the Queen how detrimental to her service such steps must be. He had many opportunities of doing it. The Duke of Marlborough having obtained of the Queen that Cardonnel should be Secretary of War as a reward for his services, when the war was ended, which he hoped would be soon, and the Queen having allowed Mr. Cardonnel to kiss her hand upon that promise, but to let him go over with the Duke of Marlborough, that campaign or another, if the war happened to be not concluded. Mr. Walpole was so low then that he executed this place for Mr. Cardonnel, and attended the Duke of Marlborough when he was in England with a bag of writings like Mr. Cardonnel. He managed it so that to make the Duke of Marlborough believe that he had done all he could with the Queen, and at the same time gained all the points Mrs. Masham had desired for her husband and brother; and I had incontestable proofs afterwards that Mr. Walpole had acted this double part to oblige Mrs. Masham, and the Duke of Marlborough at that time had no reason to believe he could be so false.

“Sir Robert also had a great obligation to me; for by my interest wholly he was made Treasurer of the Navy when Sir T. Lyttleton died, though there were solicitations from many people for that employment, whom they thought it of more consequence to oblige. But I prevailed, and he had then only a small estate, and that much encumbered. And I have letters of acknowledgment to me, in which he says ‘he is very sensible that he was entirely obliged to me for it.’

“Notwithstanding which at the commencement of his great power with the present family, he used me with all the folly and insolence upon every occasion, as he has treated several since he has acted as if he were King, which would be too tedious to relate.

“I am not sure that some account of this has not been given before. But if it has the truth is always the same. And it is no great matter, since what I write is only information of the historian to give character.

“For being perpetually interrupted, it is impossible to remember what I may have formally written on these subjects.”

All of which above tends to show that in her old age Duchess Sarah had grown testy, and not forgetful of her old enemies.