Lives of the Queens of England of the House of Hanover, volume 1 (of 2)

The parliament, having passed a Land-tax bill of two shillings in the pound, exempted the Prince of Wales from contributing even the usual sixpence in the pound on his civil-list revenue, and settled a dowry on his wife of 50,000l. per annum, peremptorily rejected Sir John Bernard’s motion for decreasing the taxation which weighed most heavily on the poor.33 The public found matter for much speculation in these circumstances, and they alternately discussed them with the subject of the aggressive ambition of Russia. The latter power was then invading the Crimea with two armies under Munich and Lasci. The occupier of the Muscovite throne stooped to mendacity to veil the real object of the war; and there were Russian officers not ashamed to be assassins—murdering the wounded foe whom they found lying helpless on their path.34

The interest in all home and foreign matters, however, was speedily lost in that which the public took in the matter, which soon presented itself, of the accession of an heir in the direct hereditary line of Brunswick.

The prospect of the birth of a lineal heir to the throne ought to have been one of general joy in a family whose own possession of the crown was contested by the disinherited heir of the Stuart line. The prospect, however, brought no joy with it on the present occasion. It was not till within a month of the time for the event that the Prince of Wales officially announced to his father, on the best possible authority, the probability of the event itself. Caroline appears at once to have disbelieved the announcement. She was so desirous of the succession falling to her second son, William, that she made no scruple of expressing her disbelief of what, to most other observers, was apparent enough. She questioned the princess herself, with more closeness than even the position of a mother-in-law could justify; but for every query the well-trained Augusta had one stereotyped reply—‘I don’t know.’ Caroline, on her side, resolved to be better instructed. ‘I will positively be present,’ she exclaimed, ‘when the promised event takes place;’ adding, with her usual broadness of illustration, ‘It can’t be got through as soon as one can blow one’s nose; and I am resolved to be satisfied that the child is hers.’

These suspicions, of which the Queen made no secret, were of course well known to her son. He was offended by them; offended, too, at a peremptory order that the birth of the expected heir should take place in Hampton Court Palace; and he was, moreover, stirred up by his political friends to exhibit his own independence, and to oppose the royal wish, in order to show that he had a proper spirit of freedom.

Accordingly, twice he brought the princess to London, and twice returned with her to Hampton Court. Each time the journey had been undertaken on symptoms of indisposition coming on, which, however, passed away. At length one evening, the prince and princess, after dining in public with the King and Queen, took leave of them for the night, and withdrew to their apartments. Up to this hour the princess had appeared to be in her ordinary health. Tokens of supervening change came on, and the prince at once prepared for action. The night (the 31st of July) was now considerably advanced, and the Princess of Wales, who had been hitherto eager to obey her husband’s wishes in all things, was now too ill to do anything but pray against them. He would not listen to such petitions. He ordered his ‘coach’ to be got ready and brought round to a side entrance of the palace. The lights in the apartment were in the meantime extinguished. He consigned his wife to the strong arms of Desnoyers, the dancing-master, and Bloodworth, an attendant, who dragged, rather than carried, her down stairs. In the meantime, the poor lady, whose life was in very present peril, and sufferings extreme, prayed earnestly to be permitted to remain where she was. Subsequently she protested to the Queen that all that had been done had taken place at her own express desire! However this may be, the prince answered her prayers and moans by calling on her to have courage; upbraiding her for her folly; and assuring her, with a very manly complacency, that it was nothing, and would soon be over! At length the coach was reached. It was the usually capacious vehicle of the time, and into it got not only the prince and princess, but Lady Archibald Hamilton and two female attendants. Vriad, who was not only a valet-de-chambre, but a surgeon and accoucheur, mounted the box. Bloodworth, the dancing-master, and two or three more, got up behind. The prince enjoined the strictest silence on such of his household as remained at Hampton Court, and therewith the coach set off, at a gallop, not for the prince’s own residence at Kew, but for St. James’s Palace, which was at twice the distance.

At the palace nothing was prepared for them. There was not a couch ready for the exhausted lady, who had more than once on the road been, as it seemed, upon the point of expiring; not even a bed was ready for her to lie down and repose upon. No sheets were to be found in the whole palace—or at least in that part over which the prince had any authority. For lack of them, Frederick and Lady Hamilton aired a couple of tablecloths, and these did the service required of them.

In the meantime, notice had been sent to several officers of state, and to the more necessary assistants required, to be present at the imminent event. Most of the great officers were out of the way. In lieu of them arrived the Lord President, Wilmington, and the Lord Privy Seal, Godolphin. In their presence was born a daughter, whom Lord Hervey designated as ‘a little rat’ and described as being ‘no bigger than a tooth-pick case.’

Perhaps it was the confusion which reigned before and at her birth which had some influence on her intellects in after life. She was an extremely pretty child, not without some mental qualifications; but she became remarkable for making observations which inflicted pain and embarrassment on those to whom they were addressed. In after years, she also became the mother of that Caroline of Brunswick who herself made confusion worse confounded in the family into which she was received as a member—that Caroline whom we recollect as the consort of George IV. and the protectress of Baron Bergami.

At Hampton Court, the King and Queen, concluding that their dear son and heir had, with his consort, relieved his illustrious parents of his undesired presence for the night, thought of nothing so little as of that son having taken it into his head to perform a trick which might have been fittingly accompanied by the ‘Beggars’ Opera’ chorus of ‘Hurrah for the Road!’

No comedy has such a scene as that enacted at Hampton Court on this night. While the prince was carrying off the princess, despite all her agonising entreaties, the rest of the royal family were quietly amusing themselves in another part of the palace, unconscious of what was passing. The King and the Princess Amelia were at commerce below-stairs; the Queen, in another apartment, was at quadrille; and the Princess Caroline and Lord Hervey were soberly playing at cribbage. They separated at ten, and were all in bed by eleven, perfectly ignorant of what had been going on so near them.

At a little before two o’clock in the morning, Mrs. Tichborne entered the royal bedchamber, when the Queen, waking in alarm, asked her if the palace was on fire. The faithful servant intimated that the prince had just sent word that her royal highness was on the point of becoming a mother. A courier had just arrived, in fact, with the intelligence. The Queen leaped out of bed and called for her ‘morning gown,’ wherein to hurry to the room of her daughter-in-law. When Tichborne intimated that she would need a coach as well as a gown, for that her royal highness had been carried off to St. James’s, the Queen’s astonishment and indignation were equally great. On the news being communicated to the King, his surprise and wrath were not less than the Queen’s, but he did not fail to blame his consort as well as his son. She had allowed herself to be outwitted, he said; a false child would despoil her own offspring of their rights; and this was the end of all her boasted care and management for the interests of her son William! He hoped that Anne would come from Holland and scold her. ‘You deserve,’ he exclaimed, ‘anything she can say to you.’ The Queen answered little, lest it should impede her in her haste to reach London. In half an hour she had left the palace accompanied by her two daughters, and attended by two ladies and three noblemen. The party reached St. James’s by four o’clock.

As they ascended the staircase, Lord Hervey invited her Majesty to take chocolate in his apartments after she had visited the princess. The Queen replied to the invitation ‘with a wink,’ and a significant intimation that she certainly would refuse to accept of any refreshment at the hands of her son. One would almost suppose that she expected to be poisoned by him.

The prince, attired, according to the hour, in nightgown and cap, met his august mother as she approached his apartments, and kissed her hand and cheek, according to the mode of his country and times. He then entered garrulously into details that would have shocked the delicacy of a monthly nurse; but, as Caroline remarked, she knew a good many of them to be ‘lies.’ She was cold and reserved to the prince; but when she approached the bedside of the princess, she spoke to her gently and kindly—womanly, in short; and concluded by expressing a fear that her royal highness had suffered extremely, and a hope that she was doing well. The lady so sympathisingly addressed, answered, somewhat flippantly, that she had scarcely suffered anything, and that the matter in question was almost nothing at all. Caroline transferred her sympathy from the young mother to her new-born child. The latter was put into the Queen’s arms. She looked upon it silently for a moment, and then exclaimed in French, her ordinary language, ‘May the good God bless you, poor little creature! here you are arrived in a most disagreeable world.’ The wish failed, but the assertion was true. The ‘poor little creature’ was cursed with a long tenure of life, during which she saw her husband deprived of his inheritance, heard of his violent death, and participated in family sorrow, heavy and undeserved.

After pitying the daughter thus born, and commiserating the mother who bore her, Caroline was condemned to listen to the too minute details of the journey and its incidents, made by her son. She turned from these to shower her indignation upon those who had aided in the flight, and without whose succour the flight itself could hardly have been accomplished. She directed her indignation by turns upon all; but she let it descend with peculiar heaviness upon Lady Archibald Hamilton, and made it all the more pungent by the comment, that, considering Lady Archibald’s mature age, and her having been the mother of ten children, she had years enough, and experience enough, and offspring enough, to have taught her better things and greater wisdom. To all these winged words, the lady attacked answered no further than by turning to the prince, and repeating, ‘You see, sir!’ as though she would intimate that she had done all she could to turn him from the evil of his ways, and had gained only unmerited reproach for the exercise of a virtue, which, in this case, was likely to be its own and its only reward!

The prince was again inclined to become gossiping and offensive in his details, but his royal mother cut him short by bidding him get to bed; and with this message by way of farewell, she left the room, descended the staircase, crossed the court on foot, and proceeded to Lord Hervey’s apartments, where there awaited her gossip more welcome and very superior chocolate.

Over their ‘cups,’ right merry were the Queen and her gallant vice-chamberlain at the extreme folly of the royal son. They were too merry for Caroline to be indignant, further than her indignation could be shown by designating her son by the very rudest possible of names, and showing her contempt for all who had helped him in the night’s escapade. She acknowledged her belief that no foul play had taken place, chiefly because the child was a daughter. This circumstance was in itself no proof of the genuineness of the little lady, for if Frederick had been desirous of setting aside his brother William, his mother’s favourite, from all hope of succeeding to the throne, the birth of a daughter was quite as sufficient for the purpose as that of a son.35 The Queen comforted herself by remarking that, at all events, the trouble she had taken that night was not gratuitous. It would at least, as she delicately remarked, be a ‘good grimace for the public,’ who would contrast her parental anxiety with the marital cruelty and the filial undutifulness of the Prince of Wales.

While this genial pair were thus enjoying their chocolate and gossip, the two princesses, and two or three of the noblemen in attendance, were doing the same in an adjoining apartment. Meanwhile Walpole had arrived, and had been closeted with the prince, who again had the supreme felicity of narrating to the unwilling listener all the incidents of the journey, in telling which he, in fact, gave to the minister the opportunity which Gyges was afforded by Candaules, or something very like it, and for which Frederick merited, if not the fate of the heathen husband, at least the next severe penalty short of it.

The sun was up long before the royal and illustrious party dispersed. The busy children of industry, who saw the Queen and her equipage sweep by them along the Western Road, must have been perplexed with attempts at guessing at the causes of her Majesty being so early abroad, in so wayworn a guise. The last thing they could then have conjectured was the adventure of the night—the scene at Hampton Court, the flight of the son with his wife, the pursuit of the royal mother with her two daughters, the occurrence at St. James’s—or, indeed, any of the incidents of the stirring drama that had been played out.

From the hour when royalty had been suddenly aroused to that at which the Queen arrived at Hampton Court Palace—eight in the morning, George II. had troubled himself as little with conjecturing as his subjects. When the Queen detailed to him all that had passed, he poured out the usual amount of paternal wrath, and of the usual quality. He never was nice of epithet, and least of all when he had any to bestow upon his son. It was not spared now, and what was most liberally given was most bitter of quality.

Meanwhile, both prince and princess addressed to their Majesties explanatory notes in French, which explained nothing, and which, as far as regards the prince’s notes, were in poor French and worse spelling. Everything, of course, had been done for the best; and the sole regret of the younger couple was, that they had somehow, they could not guess how or wherefore, incurred the displeasure of the King and Queen. To be restored to the good opinion of the latter was, of course, the one object of the involuntary offenders’ lives. In short, they had had their way; and, having enjoyed that exquisite felicity, they were not reluctant to pretend that they were extremely penitent for what had passed.

The displeasure of Caroline and her consort at the unfeeling conduct of Frederick was made known to the latter neither in a sudden nor an undignified way. It was not till the 10th of September that it may be said to have been officially conveyed to the prince. On that day the King and Queen sent a message to him from Hampton Court, by the Dukes of Grafton and Richmond and the Earl of Pembroke, who faithfully acquitted themselves of their unwelcome commission at St. James’s. The message was to the effect, that ‘the whole tenor of the prince’s conduct for a considerable time had been so entirely void of all real duty, that their Majesties had long had reason to be highly offended with him; and, until he withdrew his regard and confidence from those by whose instigation and advice he was directed and encouraged in his unwarrantable behaviour to his Majesty and the Queen, and until he should return to his duty, he should not reside in a palace belonging to the King, which his Majesty would not suffer to be made the resort of those who, under the appearance of an attachment to the prince, fomented the divisions which he had made in his family, and thereby weakened the common interest of the whole.’ Their Majesties further made known their pleasure that ‘the prince should leave St. James’s, with all his family, when it could be done without prejudice or inconvenience to the princess.’ His Majesty added, that ‘he should, for the present, leave the care of his grand-daughter until a proper time called upon him to consider of her education.’ In consequence of this message, the prince removed to Kew on the 14th of September.

The King and Queen now not only treated their son with extraordinary severity, and spoke of him in the coarsest possible language, but they treated in like manner all who were suspected of aiding and counselling him. Their wrath was especially directed against Lord Carteret, who had at first deceived them. That noble lord censured, in their hearing, a course of conduct in the prince which he had himself suggested, and, in the hearing of the heir-apparent, never failed to praise. When their Majesties discovered this double-dealing, and that an attempt was being made to convince the people that in the matter of the birth of the princess royal, the Queen alone was to blame for all the disagreeable incidents attending it, their anger was extreme. The feeling for Lord Carteret was shown when Lord Hervey one day spoke of him with some commiseration—his son having run away from school, and there being no intelligence of him, except that he had formed a very improper marriage. ‘Why do you pity him?’ said the King to Lord Hervey: ‘I think it is a very just punishment, that, while he is acting the villainous part he does in debauching the minds of other people’s children, he should feel a little what it is to have an undutiful puppy of a son himself!’

Fierce, indeed, was the family feud, and undignified as fierce. The Princess Amelia is said to have taken as double-sided a line of conduct as Lord Carteret himself; for which she incurred the ill-will of both parties. The prince declared not only that he never would trust her again, but that, should he ever be reconciled with the King and Queen, his first care should be to inform them that she had never said so much harm of him to them as she had of them to him. The Princess Caroline was the more fierce partisan of the mother whom she loved, from the fact that she saw how her brother was endeavouring to direct the public feeling against the Queen. She was, however, as little dignified in her fierceness as the rest of her family. On one occasion, as Desnoyers, the dancing-master, had concluded his lesson to the young princesses, and was about to return to the prince, who made of him a constant companion, the Princess Caroline bade him inform his patron, if the latter should ever ask him what was thought of his conduct by her, that it was her opinion that he and all who were with him, except the Princess of Wales, deserved hanging. Desnoyers delivered the message, with the assurances of respect given by one who acquits himself of a disagreeable commission to one whom he regards. ‘How did the prince take it?’ asked Caroline, when next Desnoyers appeared at Hampton Court. ‘Well, madam,’ said the dancing-master, ‘he first spat in the fire, and then observed, “Ah, ah! Desnoyers; you know the way of that Caroline. That is just like her. She is always like that!”’ ‘Well, M. Desnoyers,’ remarked the princess, ‘when next you see him again, tell him that I think his observation is as foolish as his conduct.’

The exception made by the Princess Caroline of the Princess of Wales, in the censure distributed by the former, was not undeserved. She was the mere tool of her husband, who made no confidante of her, had not yet appreciated her, but kept her in the most complete ignorance of all that was happening around her, and much of which immediately concerned her. He used to speak of the office of wife in the very coarsest terms; and did not scruple to declare that he would not be such a fool as his father was, who allowed himself to be ruled and deceived by his consort.

In the meantime, he treated his mother with mingled contempt and hypocrisy. When, nine days after the birth of the little Princess Augusta, the Queen and her two daughters again visited the Princess of Wales, the prince, who met her at the door of the bedchamber, never uttered a single word during the period his mother remained in the room.

He was as silent to his sisters; but he was ‘the agreeable “rattle”’ with the members of the royal suite. The Queen remained an hour; and when she remarked that she was afraid she was troublesome, no word fell from the prince or princess to persuade her to the contrary. When the royal carriage had arrived to conduct her away, her son led her downstairs, and at the coach door, ‘to make the mob believe that he was never wanting in any respect, he kneeled down in the dirty street, and kissed her hand. As soon as this operation was over, he put her Majesty into the coach, and then returned to the steps of his own door, leaving his sisters to get through the dirt and the mob, by themselves, as they could. Nor did there come to the Queen any message, either from the prince or princess, to thank her afterwards for the trouble she had taken, or for the honour she had done them in this visit.’ This was the last time the mother and son met in this world. Horace Walpole well observes of the scene that it must have caused the Queen’s indignation to shrink into mere contempt.

The Queen’s wrath never subsided beyond a cold expression of forgiveness to the prince when she was on her death-bed; but she resolutely refused to see him when that solemn hour arrived, a few months subsequently. She was blamed for this; but her contempt was too deeply rooted to allow her to act otherwise to one who had done all he could to embitter the peace of his father. She sent to him, it is said, her blessing and pardon; ‘but conceiving the extreme distress it would lay on the King, should he thus be forced to forgive so impenitent a son, or to banish him if once recalled, she heroically preferred a meritorious husband to a worthless child.’36

Had the prince been sincere in his expressions when addressing either of his parents by letter after the delivery of his wife, it is not impossible but that a reconciliation might have followed. His studied disrespect towards the Queen was, however, too strongly marked to allow of this conclusion to the quarrel. He invariably omitted to speak of her as ‘your Majesty;’ Madam, and you, were the simple and familiar terms employed by him. Indeed, he more than once told her that he considered that the Prince of Wales took precedence of the Queen-consort; at which Caroline would contemptuously laugh, and assure her ‘dear Fritz’ that he need not press the point, for even if she were to die, the King could not marry him!

It was for mere annoyance’ sake that he declared, at the end of August, after the christening of his daughter, that she should not be called the ‘Princess Augusta,’ but the ‘Lady Augusta,’ according to the old English fashion. At the same time he declared that she should be styled ‘Your Royal Highness,’ although such style had never been used towards his own sisters before their father’s accession to the crown.

It will hardly be thought necessary to go through the documentary history of what passed between the Sovereigns and their son before he was finally ejected from St. James’s Palace. Wrong as he was in his quarrel, ‘Fritz’ kept a better temper, though with as bitter a spirit as his parents. On the 13th of September, the day before that fixed on for the prince’s departure, ‘the Queen, at breakfast, every now and then repeated, I hope in God I shall never see him again; and the King, among many other paternal douceurs in his valediction to his son, said: Thank God! to-morrow night the puppy will be out of my house.’ The Queen thought her son would rather like, than otherwise, to be made a martyr of; but it was represented to her, that however much it might have suited him to be made one politically, there was more disgrace to him personally in the present expulsion than he would like to digest. The King maintained that his son had not sense of his own to find this out; and that as he listened only to boobies, fools, and madmen, he was not likely to have his case truly represented to him. And then the King ran through the list of his son’s household; and Lord Carnarvon was set down as being as coxcombical and irate a fool as his master; Lord Townshend, for a proud, surly booby; Lord North, as a poor creature; Lord Baltimore, as a trimmer; and ‘Johnny Lumley’ (the brother of Lord Scarborough), as, if nothing else, at least ‘a stuttering puppy.’ Such, it is said, were the followers of a prince, of whom his royal mother remarked, that he was ‘a mean fool’ and ‘a poor-spirited beast.’

While this dissension was at its hottest, the Queen fell ill of the gout. She was so unwell, so weary of being in bed, and so desirous of chatting with Lord Hervey, that she now for the first time broke through the court etiquette, which would not admit a man, save the Sovereign, into the royal bed-chamber. The noble lord was with her there during the whole day of each day that her confinement lasted. She was too old, she said, to have the honour of being talked of for it; and so, to suit her humour, the old ceremony was dispensed with. Lord Hervey sate by her bed-side, gossiped the live-long day; and on one occasion, when the Prince of Wales sent Lord North with a message of enquiry after her health, he amused the Queen by turning the message into very slipshod verse, the point of which is at once obscure and ill-natured, but which seems to imply that the prince would have been well content had the gout, instead of being in her foot, attacked her stomach.

The prince had been guilty of no such indecency as this; but there was no lack of provocation to make him commit himself. When he was turned out of St. James’s, he was not permitted to take with him a single article of furniture. The royal excuse was, that the furniture had been purchased, on the prince’s marriage, at the King’s cost, and was his Majesty’s property. It was suggested that sheets ought not to be considered as furniture; and that the prince and princess could not be expected to carry away their dirty linen in baskets. ‘Why not?’ asked the King; ‘it is good enough for them!’

Such were the petty circumstances with which Caroline and her consort troubled themselves at the period in question. They at once hurt their own dignity and made their son look ridiculous. The great partisan of the latter (Lord Baltimore) did not rescue his master from ridicule by comparing his conduct to that of the heroic Charles XII. of Sweden. But the comparison was one to be expected from a man whom the King had declared to be, in a great degree, a booby, and, in a trifling degree, mad.

As soon as the prince had established himself at Kew, he was waited on by Lord Carteret, Sir William Wyndham, and Mr. Pulteney. The King could not conceal his anger under an affected contempt of these persons or of their master. He endeavoured to satisfy himself by abusing the latter, and by remarking that ‘they would soon be tired of the puppy, who was, moreover, a scoundrel and a fool; and who would talk more fiddle-faddle to them in a day than any old woman talks in a week.’

The prince continued to address letters both to the King and Queen, full of affected concern, expressed in rather impertinent phrases. The princess addressed others, in which she sought to justify her husband’s conduct; but as in all these notes there was a studied disrespect of Caroline, the King would neither consent to grant an audience to the offenders, nor would the Queen interfere to induce him to relent.

The Queen, indeed, did not scruple to visit with her displeasure all those courtiers who showed themselves inclined to bring about a reconciliation; and yet she manifested some leaning towards Lord Carteret, the chief agent of her son. This disposition alarmed Walpole, who took upon himself to remind her that her minister could serve her purpose better than her son’s, and that it was of the utmost importance that she should conquer in this strife. ‘Is your son to be bought?’ said Walpole. ‘If you will buy him, I will get him cheaper than Carteret.’ Caroline answered only with ‘a flood of grace, good words, favour, and professions’ of having full confidence in her own minister—that is, Walpole himself—who had served her so long and so faithfully.

A trait of Caroline’s character may here be mentioned, as indicative of how she could help to build up her own reputation for shrewdness by using the materials of others. Sir Robert Walpole, in conversation with Lord Hervey, gave him some account of an interview he had had with the Queen. The last-named gentleman believed all the great minister had told him, because the Queen herself had, in speaking of the subject to Lord Hervey, used the precise terms now employed by Walpole. The subject was the lukewarmness of some of the noblemen about court to serve the King: the expression used was—‘People who keep hounds must not hang every one that runs a little slower than the rest, provided, in the main, they will go with the pack; one must not expect them all to run just alike and to be equally good.’ Hervey told Walpole of the use made by the Queen of this phrase, and Sir Robert naturally enough remarked, ‘He was always glad when he heard she repeated as her own any notion he had endeavoured to infuse, because it was a sign what he had laboured had taken place.’

Meanwhile the prince was of himself doing little that could tend to anything else than widen the breach already existing between him and his family. He spoke aloud of what he would do when he came to be King. His intentions, as reported by Caroline, were that she, when she was Queen-dowager, should be ‘fleeced, flayed, and minced.’ The Princess Amelia was to be kept in strict confinement; the Princess Caroline left to starve; of the little princesses, Mary and Louisa, then about fourteen and thirteen years of age, he made no mention; and of his brother, the Duke of Cumberland, he always spoke ‘with great affectation of kindness.’

Despite this imprudent conduct, endeavours continued to be made by the prince and his friends, in order to bring about the reconciliation which nobody seemed very sincere in desiring. The Duke of Newcastle had implored the Princess Amelia, ‘For God’s sake!’ to do her utmost ‘to persuade the Queen to make things up with the prince before this affair was pushed to an extremity which might make the wound incurable.’ The Queen is said to have been exceedingly displeased with the Duke of Newcastle for thus interfering in the matter. The Princess of Wales, however, continued to write hurried and apparently earnest notes to the Queen, thanking her for her kindness in standing godmother to her daughter, treating her with ‘Your Majesty,’ and especially defending her own husband, while affecting to deplore that his conduct, misrepresented, had incurred the displeasure of their Majesties. ‘I am deeply afflicted,’ so runs a note of the 17th of September, ‘at the manner in which the prince’s conduct has been represented to your Majesties, especially with regard to the two journeys which we made from Hampton Court to London the week previous to my confinement. I dare assure your Majesties, that the medical man and midwife were then of opinion that I should not be confined before the month of September, and that the indisposition of which I complained was nothing more than the cholic. And besides, madam, is it credible, that if I had gone twice to London with the design and in the expectation of being confined there, I should have returned to Hampton Court? I flatter myself that time and the good offices of your Majesty will bring about a happy change in a situation of affairs, the more deplorable for me inasmuch as I am the innocent cause of it,’ &c.

This letter, delivered as the King and Queen were going to chapel, was sent by the latter to Walpole, who repaired to the royal closet in the chapel, where Caroline asked him what he thought of this last performance? The answer was very much to the purpose. Sir Robert said, he detected ‘you lie, you lie, you lie, from one end of it to the other.’ Caroline agreed that the lie was flung at her by the writer.

There was as much discussion touching the reply which should be sent to this grievously offending note as if it had been a protocol of the very first importance. One was for having it smart, another formal, another so shaped that it should kindly treat the princess as blameless, and put an end to further correspondence, with some general wishes as to the future conduct of ‘Fritz.’ This was done, and the letter was despatched. What effect it had upon the conduct of the person alluded to may be discerned in the fact that when, on Thursday, the 22nd of September, the prince and princess received at Carlton House the Lord Mayor and Corporation of London, with an address of congratulation on the birth of the Princess Augusta, the lords of the prince’s present council distributed to everybody in the room copies of the King’s message to the prince, ordering him to quit St. James’s, and containing reflections against all persons who might even visit the prince. The lords, particularly the Duke of Marlborough and Lords Chesterfield and Carteret, deplored the oppression under which the Prince of Wales struggled. His highness also spoke to the citizens in terms calculated—certainly intended—to win their favour.

He did not acquire all the popular favour he expected. Thus, when, during the repairs of Carlton House, he occupied the residence of the Duke of Norfolk, in St. James’s Square—a residence which the duke and duchess refused to let to him, until they had obtained the sanction of the King and Queen—‘he reduced the number of his inferior servants, which made him many enemies among the lower sort of people.’ He also diminished his stud, and ‘farmed all his tables, even that of the princess and himself.’ In other words, his tables were supplied by a cook at so much per head.

His position was one, however, which was sure to procure for him a degree of popularity, irrespective of his real merits. The latter, however, were not great nor numerous, and even his own officers considered their interests far before those of him they served—or deserted. At the theatre, however, he was the popular hero of the hour, and when once, on being present at the representation of ‘Cato,’37 the words—

were received with loud huzzas, the prince joined in the applause, to show how he appreciated, and perhaps applied, the lines.

Although the King’s alleged oppression towards his son was publicly canvassed by the latter, the prince and his followers invariably named the Queen as the true author of it. The latter, in commenting on this filial course, constantly sacrificed her dignity. ‘My dear lord,’ said Caroline, once, to Lord Hervey, ‘I will give it you under my hand, if you have any fear of my relapsing, that my dear first-born is the greatest ass, and the greatest liar, and the greatest canaille, and the greatest beast, in the whole world, and that I most heartily wish he was out of it!’ The King continued to treat him in much the same strain, adding, courteously, that he had often asked the Queen if the beast were his son. ‘The Queen was a great while,’ said he, ‘before her maternal affection would give him up for a fool, and yet I told her so before he had been acting as if he had no common sense.’ While so hard upon the conduct of their son, an entry from Lord Hervey’s diary will show us what was their own: the King’s with regard to decency, the Queen’s with respect to truth.

Whilst the Queen was talking one morning touching George I.’s will and other family matters, with Lord Hervey, ‘the King opened her door at the further end of the gallery; upon which the Queen chid Lord Hervey for coming so late, saying, that she had several things to say to him, and that he was always so long in coming, after he was sent for, that she never had any time to talk with him. To which Lord Hervey replied, that it was not his fault, for that he always came the moment he was called; that he wished, with all his heart, the King had more love, or Lady Deloraine more wit, that he might have more time with her Majesty; but that he thought it very hard that he should be snubbed and reproved because the King was old and Lady Deloraine a fool. This made the Queen laugh; and the King asking, when he came up to her, what it was at, she said it was at a conversation Lord Hervey was reporting between the prince and Mr. Lyttelton, on his being made secretary. The King desired him to repeat it. Lord Hervey got out of the difficulty as he best could. When the Queen and my lord next met, she said: “I think I was one with you for your impertinence.” To which Lord Hervey replied, “The next time you serve me so, madam, perhaps I may be even with you, and desire your Majesty to repeat as well as report.”’38

It may be noticed here, that both Frederick and the Queen’s party published copies of the French correspondence which had passed between the two branches of the family at feud, and that in the translations appended to the letters, each party was equally unscrupulous in giving such turns to the phrases as should serve only one side, and injure the adverse faction. Bishop Sherlock, who set the good fashion of residing much within his own diocese, once ventured to give an opinion upon the prince’s conduct, which at least served to show that the prelate was not a very finished courtier. Bishops who reside within their dioceses, and trouble themselves little with what takes place beyond it, seldom are. The bishop said that the prince had lacked able counsellors, had weakly played his game into the King’s hands, and made a blunder which he would never retrieve. This remark provoked Caroline to say—‘I hope, my lord, this is not the way you intend to speak your disapprobation of my son’s measures anywhere else; for your saying that, by his conduct lately, he has played his game into the King’s hands, one would imagine you thought the game had been before in his own; and though he has made his game still worse than it was, I am far from thinking it ever was a good one, or that he had ever much chance to win.’

Caroline, and indeed her consort also, conjectured that the public voice and opinion were expressed in favour of the occupants of the throne from the fact, that the birthday drawing-room of the 30th of October was the most splendid and crowded which had ever been known since the King’s accession. That King himself probably little cared whether he were popular or not. He was at this time buying hundreds of lottery-tickets, out of the secret-service money, and making presents of them to Madame Walmoden. A few fell, perhaps, to the share of Lady Deloraine: ‘He’ll give her a couple of tickets,’ said Walpole, ‘and think her generously used.’ His Majesty would have rejoiced if he could have divided so easily his double possession of England and Hanover. He had long entertained a wish to give the Electorate to his second son, William of Cumberland, and entertained a very erroneous idea that the English parliament could assist him in altering the law of succession in the Electorate. Caroline had, perhaps, not a much more correctly formed idea. She had a conviction, however, touching her son, which was probably better founded. ‘I knew,’ she said, ‘he would sell not only his reversion in the Electorate, but even in this kingdom, if the Pretender would give him five or six hundred thousand pounds in present; but, thank God! he has neither right nor power to sell his family—though his folly and his knavery may sometimes distress them.’39