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

Much has been said, and many opposite conclusions drawn, as to the religious character of Caroline. In our days, such a woman would not be allowed to wear the reputation of being religious. In her days, she may with more justice have been considered so. And yet she was far below a standard of much elevation. When we hear her boasting—or rather asserting, as convinced of the fact—that ‘she had made it the business of her life to discharge her duty to God and man in the best manner she was able,’ we have no very favourable picture of her humility; though at the same time we may acquit her of hypocrisy.

Her patronage of the well-meaning but mischievous, the learned but unwise Whiston is quite sufficient to condemn her in the opinion of many people. Here was a man who had not yet, indeed, left the Church of England for the Baptist community, because the Athanasian creed was an offence to him, but he had pronounced Prince Eugène to be the man foretold in the Apocalypse as the destroyer of the Turkish Empire, had declared that the children of Joseph and Mary were the natural brothers and sisters of Christ, set up a heresy in his ‘Primitive Christianity Revived,’ made open profession of Arianism, boldly made religious prophecies which were falsified as soon as made, and, more innocently, translated ‘Josephus,’ and tried to discover the longitude. Caroline showed her admiration of heterodox Whiston by conferring on him a pension of fifty pounds a-year; and as she had a regard for the mad scholar, she paid him with her own hand, and had him as a frequent visitor at the palace. The King was more guarded in his patronage of Whiston, and one day said to him, as King, Queen, and preacher were walking together in Hampton Court Gardens, that his opinions against Athanasianism might certainly be true, but perhaps it would have been better if he had kept them to himself. Now Whiston was remarkable for his wit and his fearlessness, and looking straight in the face of the man who was King by right of the Reformation, and who was the temporal head of the Church and, ex-officio, Defender of the Faith, he said: ‘If Luther had followed such advice, I should like to know where your Majesty would have been at the present moment.’ ‘Well, Mr. Whiston,’ said Caroline, ‘you are, as I have heard it said you were, a very free speaker. Are you bold enough to tell me my faults?’ ‘Certainly,’ was Whiston’s reply. ‘There are many people who come every year from the country to London upon business. Their chief, loyal, and natural desire is to see their King and Queen. This desire they can nowhere so conveniently gratify as at the Chapel Royal. But what they see there does not edify them. They behold your Majesty talking, during nearly the whole time of service, with the King—and talking loudly. This scandalises them; they go into the country with false impressions, spread false reports, and effect no little mischief.’ The Queen pleaded that the King would talk to her, acknowledged that it was wrong, promised amendment, and asked what was the next fault he descried in her. ‘Nay, madam,’ said he, ‘it will be time enough to go to the second when your Majesty has corrected the first.’

What Caroline said of her consort was true enough. At chapel, the King, when not sleeping, would be talking. Dr. Young thought, by power of his preaching, to keep him awake; but the King, on finding that the new chaplain was not giving him what he loved, ‘a short, good sermon,’ soon began to exhibit signs of somnolency. Young exerted himself in vain; and when his Majesty at length broke forth with a snore, the poet-preacher felt his vanity so wounded that he burst into tears. Where Kings and Queens so behaved, no wonder that young ensigns flirted openly with maids of honour, and that Lady Wortley Montague should have reason to write to the Countess of Bute: ‘I confess I remember to have dressed for St. James’s Chapel with the same thoughts your daughters will have at the opera.’

It is not likely that Archbishop Potter was sent for by Caroline herself in her last illness, for she liked the prelate as little as Whiston himself did. But Potter, the first of scholars, in spite of the sneers of academical Parr, was, although a staunch Whig, and esteemed by Caroline and her consort for his sermon preached before them at their coronation, yet a very high churchman, one who put the throne infinitely below the altar, and thought kings very far indeed below priests. This last opinion, however, was very much modified when the haughty prelate, son of a Wakefield linendraper, had to petition for a favour. His practice, certainly, was not perfect, for he disinherited one son, who married a dowerless maiden out of pure love, and he left his fortune to the other, who was a profligate and squandered it.

But even Caroline could not but respect Potter for his jealousy with regard to the worthily supplying of church benefices. Just after the Queen had congratulated him on being elected to the highest position in the Church of England, Potter called on a clerical relative, to announce to him the intention of his kinsman to confer on him a valuable living. The archbishop unfortunately found his reverend cousin busily engaged at skittles, and the prelate came upon him just as the apostolic player was aiming at the centre pin, with the remark, ‘Now for a shy at the head of the Church!’ He missed his pin, and also lost his preferment. Neither of their Majesties, however, thought Potter justified in withholding a benefice on such slight grounds of offence. Neither George nor Caroline approved of clergymen of any rank inveighing against amusements. I may cite, as a case in point, the anger with which the King, in his heart, visited Gibson, Bishop of London, for denouncing masquerades, and for getting up an episcopal address to the throne, praying ‘for the entire abolition of such pernicious diversions.’ The son of Sophia Dorothea was especially fond of masquerades, and his indignation was great at hearing them denounced by Gibson. This boldness shut the latter out from all chance of succeeding to Canterbury. Caroline looked with some favour, however, on this zealous and upright prelate; and her minister, Walpole, did nothing to obstruct the exercise of his great ecclesiastical power. ‘Gibson is a pope!’ once exclaimed one of the low church courtiers of Caroline’s coterie. ‘True!’ was Walpole’s reply, ‘and a very good pope too!’

It must be confessed, nevertheless, that the church and religion were equally in a deplorable state just previous to the demise of Caroline. That ingenious and learned Northumbrian, Edward Grey, published anonymously, the year before the Queen’s death, a work upon ‘The Miserable and Distracted State of Religion in England upon the Downfall of the Church Established.’ A work, however, published the same year, and which much more interested the Queen, was Warburton’s famous ‘Alliance between Church and State.’ This book brought again into public notice its author, that William Warburton, the son of a Newark attorney, who himself had been lawyer and usher, had denounced Pope as an incapable poet, and had sunk into temporary oblivion in his Lincolnshire rectory at Brant Broughton. But his ‘Alliance between Church and State’ brought him to the notice of Queen Caroline, to whom his book and his name were introduced by Dr. Hare, the Bishop of Chichester. Caroline liked the book and desired to see the author; but her last fatal illness was upon her before he could be introduced, and Warburton had to write many books and wait many years before he found a patron in Murray (Lord Mansfield) who could help him to preferment.

Queen Caroline made of Butler’s ‘Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature’ a sort of light-reading book, which was the ordinary companion of her breakfast-table. Caroline may have liked to dip into such profound fountains; but I doubt whether she often looked into the ‘Analogy,’ as it was not published till 1736, when her malady was increasing, and her power to study a work so abstruse must have been much diminished. Still she admired the learned divine, who was the son of a Wantage shopkeeper, and who was originally a Presbyterian Dissenter—a community for which German Protestant princes and princesses have always entertained a considerable regard. Caroline did not merely admire Butler because high churchmen looked upon him, even after his ordination, as half a dissenter; she had admired his Rolls Sermons, and when Secker, another ex-Presbyterian whom Butler had induced to enter the church, introduced and recommended him to Queen Caroline, she immediately appointed him clerk of the closet. It could have been very little before this, that Secker himself—who had been a Presbyterian, a doctor, a sort of sentimental vagabond on the Continent, and a free-thinker to boot—had been, after due probation and regular progress, appointed rector of St. James’s. Walpole declares that Secker owed this preferment to the favour of the Queen, and Secker’s biographers cannot prove much to the contrary. At the period of Caroline’s death he was Bishop of Bristol, and that high dignity he is also said to have owed to the friendship of Caroline. I wish it were only as true, that when the Prince of Wales was at enmity with the King and Queen, and used to attend St. James’s Church, his place of residence being at Norfolk House, in the adjacent square—I wish, I say, it were true that Secker once preached to the prince on the text, ‘Honour thy father and mother.’ The tale, however, is apocryphal; but it is true that the prince himself, at the period of the family quarrel, was startled, on entering the church, at hearing Mr. Bonny, the clerk in orders, rather pointedly beginning the service with, ‘I will arise, and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned,’ &c.

But, perhaps, of all the members of the church, Caroline felt regard for none more than for Berkeley. He had been an active divine long, indeed, before the Queen visited him with her favour. His progress had been checked by his sermons in favour of passive obedience and non-resistance—sermons which were considered not so much inculcating loyalty to Brunswick as denouncing the revolution which opened to that house the way to the throne. Berkeley had also incurred no little public wrath by destroying the letters which Swift’s Vanessa had bequeathed to his care, with a sum of money for the express purpose of their being published. But, on the other hand, he had manifested in various ways the true spirit of a Christian and a philosopher, and had earned immortal honour by his noble attempt to convert the American savages to Christianity. But it was his ‘Minute Philosopher’—his celebrated work, the object of which was to refute scepticism, that gained for him the distinction of the approval of Caroline. The expression of such approval is warrant for the Queen’s sincerity in the cause of true religion. So delighted was the Queen with this work, that she procured for its author his nomination to the Bishopric of Cloyne. Never was reward more nobly earned, more worthily bestowed, or more gracefully conferred. It did honour alike to the Queen and to Berkeley; and it raised the hopes of those who were ready to almost despair of Christianity itself, when they saw that Religion yet had its great champions to uphold her cause, and that, however indifferent the King might be to the merits of such champions, the Queen herself was ever eager to acknowledge their services and to recompense them largely as they merited.

In controversial works, however, Caroline always delighted. She had no greater joy in this way than setting Clarke and Leibnitz at intellectual struggle, watching the turns of the contest with interest, suggesting, amending, adding, or diminishing, and advising every well-laid blow, by whichever antagonist it was delivered. It may be asked, Was there not in all this rather more love of intellectual than of religious pursuits? The reader must judge.

Caroline loved the broad English comedy of her time, and saw no harm in the very broadest. She was especially fond of the ‘Queen of Comedy,’ Mrs. Oldfield, but affected to be a little shocked at the way in which she was living with General Churchill. One day, when Mrs. Oldfield had been reading at Windsor, and was walking on the terrace with the court, the Queen said to her, ‘I hear, Mrs. Oldfield, that you and the General are married.’ ‘Madam,’ answered the actress, playing her very best, ‘the General keeps his own secrets.’ After Mrs. Oldfield’s death, the Queen bought her collection of plays for a hundred and twenty guineas.

Lord Chesterfield says of Caroline, in his lively way, that ‘she was a woman of lively, pretty parts.’ She merits, however, a better epitaph and a more sagacious chronicler. ‘Her death,’ adds the noble roué, ‘was regretted by none but the King. She died meditating projects which must have ended either in her own ruin or that of the country.’ Dismissing, for the present, the last part of this paragraph, we will say that Caroline was mourned by more than by the King; but by none so deeply, so deservedly, so naturally as by him. He had not, out of affection for her, been less selfish or less vicious than his inclinations induced him to be. He was faithless to her, but he never ceased to respect her; and in those days a husband of whom nothing worse could be said was rather exemplary of conduct than otherwise. It was a sort of decorum by no means common. One could have almost thought him uxorious; for he not only allowed himself to be directed in all important matters requiring judgment and discretion by the guidance of her more enlightened mind, but he never drew a picture of beauty and propriety in woman but all the hearers felt that the original of the picture was the Queen herself. It is strange, setting aside more grave considerations for the rule of conduct, that, with such a wife, he should have hampered himself with ‘favourites.’ These he neither loved nor respected. A transitory liking and the evil fashion of the day had something to do with it; and besides, he had a certain feeling of attachment for women who were obsequious and serviceable. These he could rule, but his wife ruled him. Nor could the women be compared. Sir Robert Walpole, an unexceptionable witness in this case, asserts that the King loved his wife’s little finger better than he did Lady Suffolk’s whole body. For that reason it was that Walpole himself so respectfully kissed the small, plump, and graceful hand of the Queen rather than propitiate the good-will of the favourite.

Caroline shared the vices in which her husband indulged, by favouring the indulgence. She was not the more excusable for this because Archdeacon Blackburn and other churchmen praised her for encouraging the King in his wickedness. Her ground of action was not founded on virtuous principle. She sanctioned, nay promoted, the vicious way of life followed by her consort merely that she might exercise more power politically and personally. She depreciated her own worth and attractions in order to heighten those of the favourites whom the King most affected, and by way of apologising for his being attracted from her to them. Actually, she had as little regard for married faith as the King himself. The Queen regarded his doings with such complacency as to give rise to a belief that she had never cared for the King, and was therefore jealouslessly indifferent as to the disgraceful tenor of his life. An allusion was once made in her presence, when the Duke of Grafton was by, to her having in former times not been unaffected by the suit of a German prince. ‘G—d, madam,’ said the duke, in the fashionable blasphemous style of the period, ‘I should like to see the man you could love!’ ‘See him?’ said the Queen, laughingly; ‘do you not then think that I love the King?’ ‘G—d, madam,’ exclaimed the ostentatious blasphemer, ‘I only wish I were King of France, and I would soon be sure whether you did or did not.’

Caroline has been laughed at for her patronage of such a poet as Duck. She had wit enough to see the merit of Gay. On her accession she offered him the honourable post of gentleman-usher to the Princess Louisa—a sinecure worth 200l. a-year, and a stepping-stone to other preferment; Gay peremptorily and scornfully declined the offer. Accordingly, Cibber was preferred to Gay for the post of laureate. Caroline had always been kind to this ‘tetchy’ poet. In 1724, when Gay’s play, ‘The Captives,’ had failed on the stage, she invited him to read it at Leicester House. On being ushered into the august company, Gay, nervous from long waiting, tragedy in hand, bashful and blundering, fell over a stool, thereby threw down a screen, and set his illustrious audience in a comical sort of confusion, amid which the kind-hearted princess did her best to put Gay at ease in his perplexities.

The King—to return to that royal widower—indubitably mourned over his loss, and regarded with some rag, as it were, of the dignity of affection her memory, and that with a tearful respect. He was for ever talking of her, even to his mistress; and Lady Yarmouth (as Madame Walmoden was called), as well as others, had to listen to the well-conned roll of her queenly virtues, and to the royal conjectures as to what the advice of Caroline would have been in certain supervening contingencies. There was something noble in his remark, on ordering the payment to be continued of all salaries to her officers and servants, and all her benefactions to benevolent institutions, that, if possible, nobody should suffer by her death but himself. We almost pity the wretched but imbecile old man too, when we see him bursting into tears at the sight of Walpole, and confessing to him, with a helpless shaking of the hands, that he had lost the rock of his support, his warmest friend, his wisest counsellor, and that henceforth he must be dreary, disconsolate, and succourless, utterly ignorant whither to turn for succour or for sympathy.

This feeling never entirely deserted him; albeit, he continued to find much consolation where he had done better not to have sought it. Still, the old memory would not entirely fade, the old fire would not entirely be quenched. ‘I hear,’ said he, once to Baron Brinkman, as he lay sleepless, at early morn, on his couch, ‘I hear you have a portrait of my wife, which was a present from her to you, and that it is a better likeness than any I have got. Let me look at it.’ The portrait was brought, and so placed before the King that he could contemplate it leisurely at his ease. ‘It is like her,’ he murmured. ‘Place it nearer me and leave me till I ring.’ For two whole hours the baron remained in attendance in an adjoining room, before he was again summoned to his master’s presence. At the end of that time, he entered the King’s bedroom, on being called. George looked up at him, with eyes full of tears, and muttered, pointing to the portrait: ‘Take it away; take it away! I never yet saw the woman worthy to buckle her shoe.’ And then he arose, and went and breakfasted with Lady Yarmouth.

A score of years after Caroline’s death, he continued to speak of her only with emotion. His vanity, however, disposed him to be considered gallant to the last. In 1755, being at Hanover, he was waited upon by the Duchess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel and all her unmarried daughters. The provident and maternal duchess had an object, and she was not very far from accomplishing it. The King considered all these young ladies with the speculative look both of a connoisseur and an amateur. He was especially struck by the beauty of the eldest, and he lost no time in proposing her as a match to his grandson and heir-apparent, George, Prince of Wales, then in his minority. The prince, at the prompting of his mother, very peremptorily declined the honour which had been submitted for his acceptance, and the young princess, her mother, and King George were all alike profoundly indignant. ‘Oh!’ exclaimed the latter with ardent eagerness, to Lord Waldegrave, ‘oh, that I were but a score of years younger, this young lady should not then have been exposed to the indignity of being refused by the Prince of Wales, for I would then myself have made her Queen of England!’ That is to say, that if the young Princess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel could only have been introduced to him while he was sitting under the shadow of the great sorrow which had fallen upon him by the death of Caroline, he would have found solace for his grief by offering her his hand. However, it was now too late, and the gay old monarch, taking his amber-headed cane, feebly picked his way to Lady Yarmouth and a game at ombre.

Lord Chesterfield allowed Caroline some degree of female knowledge. If by this he would infer that she had only a portion of the knowledge which was commonly possessed by the ladies her contemporaries, his lordship does her great injustice. Few women of her time were so well instructed; and she was not the less well-taught for being in a great degree self-taught. She may have been but superficially endowed in matters of theology and in ancient history; but, what compensated at least for the latter, she was well acquainted with what more immediately concerned her, the history of her own times. Lord Chesterfield further remarks, that Caroline would have been an agreeable woman in social life if she had not aimed at being a great one in public life. This would imply that she had doubly failed, where, in truth, she had doubly succeeded. She was agreeable in the circle of social, and she not merely aimed at, but achieved, greatness in public life. She was as great a queen as queen could become in England under the circumstances in which she was placed. Without any constitutional right, she ruled the country with such wisdom that her right always seemed to rest on a constitutional basis. There was that in her, that, had her destiny taken her to Russia instead of England, she would have been as Catherine was in all but her uncleanness; not that, in purity of mind, she was very superior to Catherine the Unclean.

The following paragraph in Lord Chesterfield’s character of Caroline is less to be contested than others in which the noble author has essayed to pourtray the Queen. ‘She professed wit, instead of concealing it; and valued herself on her skill in simulation and dissimulation, by which she made herself many enemies, and not one friend, even among the women the nearest to her person.’ It may very well be doubted, however, whether any sovereign ever had a ‘friend’ in the true acceptation of that term. It is much if they acquire an associate whose interest or inclination it is to be faithful; but such a person is not a friend.

Lord Chesterfield seems to warm against her as he proceeds in his picture. ‘Cunning and perfidy,’ he says, ‘were the means she made use of in business, as all women do for want of a better.’ This blow is dealt at one poor woman merely for the purpose of smiting all. Caroline, no doubt, was full of art, and on the stage of public life was a mere, but most accomplished, actress. It must be remembered, too, that she was surrounded by cunning and perfidious people. Society was never so unprincipled as it was during her time; and yet, amid its unutterable corruption, all women were not crafty and treacherous. There were some noble exceptions; but these did not lie much in the way of the deaf and dissolute earl’s acquaintance.

‘She had a dangerous ambition,’ continues the same author, ‘for it was attended with courage, and, if she had lived much longer, might have proved fatal either to herself or the constitution.’ It is courage like Caroline’s which plucks peril from ambition, but does not indeed make the latter less dangerous to the people; which is, perhaps, what Chesterfield means. With respect to the Queen’s religion, he says: ‘After puzzling herself in all the whimsies and fantastical speculations of different sects, she fixed herself ultimately in Deism, believing in a future state.’ In this he merely repeats a story, which, probably, originated with those whose views on church questions were of a ‘higher’ tendency than those of her Majesty. And after repeating others, he contradicts himself; for he has no sooner stated that the Queen was not an agreeable woman, because she aimed at being a great one, than he adds, ‘Upon the whole, the agreeable woman was liked by most people—but the Queen was neither esteemed, beloved, nor trusted by anybody but the King.’ At least, she was not despised by everybody; and that, considering the times in which she lived, and the discordant parties over whom she really reigned, is no slight commendation. It is a praise which cannot be awarded to the King.

Let us add, that not only has Chesterfield said of Caroline that she settled down to Deism, ‘believing in a future state,’ but he has said the same, and in precisely the same terms, of Pope and—upon Pope’s authority—of Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester. Here is at least a double and, perhaps, as we should hope, a triple error.

The popular standard of morality was deplorably low throughout the reigns of the first two Georges. Marlborough was ridiculed for the unwavering fidelity and affection which he manifested towards his wife. There were few husbands like him, at the time, in either respect. He was satirised for being superior to almost irresistible temptations; he was laughed at for having prayers in his camp—for turning reverently to God before he turned fiercely against his foes; the epigrammatists were particularly severe against him because he was honest enough to pay his debts and live within his income. But ‘his meanness?’ Well, his meanness might rather be called prudence; and if his censurers had nourished in themselves something of the same quality, it would have been the better for themselves and their contemporaries, and, indeed, none the worse for their descendants. One of the alleged instances of Marlborough’s meanness is cited, in his having once played at whist with Dean Jones, at which he left off the winner of sixpence. The dean delayed to pay the stake, and the duke asked for it, stating that he wanted the sixpence for a chair to go home in. It seems to me that the meanness rested with the rich dean in not paying, and not with the millionaire duke in requiring to be paid.

No man ever spoke more disparagingly of Marlborough than his enemy, Lord Peterborough, though even he did justice to Marlborough’s abilities; but Lord Peterborough was especially severe on the duke’s love of money. The latter spent wisely, the former squandered profusely, and cheated his heirs. The duke in the Bath-rooms, dunning a dean for sixpence, is not so degrading a picture as Peterborough, in the Bath market, cheapening commodities, and walking about in his blue ribbon and star, with a fowl in his hand and a cabbage or a cauliflower under either arm. Peterborough was lewd and sensual, vain, passionate, and inconstant, a mocker of Christianity, and a remorseless transgressor of the laws of God and man. He was superior to Marlborough only in one thing—in spelling. A poor boast. Compare the duke, leading a well-regulated life, and walking daily with his God, to Peterborough, whose only approaches to religion consisted in his once going to hear Penn preach, because he ‘liked to be civil to all religions,’ and in his saying of Fenelon that he was a delicious creature, but dangerous, because acquaintance with him was apt to make men pious!

Marlborough’s favourite general, Cadogan, was one of the ornaments of the court of George and Caroline down to 1726. They had reason to regard him, for he was a staunch Whig, although, as a diplomatist, he perilled what he was commissioned to preserve. His morality is evidenced in his remark made when some one enquired, on the committal of Atterbury to the Tower for Jacobite dealings, what should be done with the bishop? ‘Done with him!’ roared Cadogan; ‘throw him to the lions!’ Atterbury, on hearing of this meek suggestion, burst out with an explosion of alliterative fierceness, and denounced the earl to Pope ‘as a bold, bad, blundering, blustering, bloody bully!’ The episcopal sense of forgiveness was on a par with the sentiment of mercy which influenced the bosom of the soldier.

But Marlborough’s social, severe, and domestic virtues were not asked for in the commanders of following years. Thus Macartney, despite the blood upon his hand, stained in the duel between the Duke of Hamilton and Lord Mohun, was made colonel of the twenty-first regiment six years previous to the Queen’s death. General Webb, who died two years previously, was thought nothing the worse for his thrasonic propensity, and was for ever boasting of his courage, and alluding to the four wounds he had received in the battle of Wynendael. ‘My dear general,’ said the Duke of Argyle, on one of these occasions, ‘I wish you had received a fifth—in your tongue; for then everybody else would have talked of your deeds!’

Still more unfavourably shines another of the generals of this reign. Lord Cobham did not lack bravery, but he owed most of his celebrity to Pope. He did not care how wicked a man was, provided only he were a gentleman in his vices; and he was guilty of an act which Marlborough would have contemplated with horror—namely, tried hard to make infidels of two promising young gentlemen—Gilbert West, and George, subsequently Lord, Lyttelton.

Marlborough, too, was superior in morality to Blakeney, that brave soldier and admirable dancer of Irish jigs; but who was so addicted to amiable excesses, of which court and courtiers thought little at this liberal period, that he drank punch till he was paralysed. And surely it was better, like Marlborough, to play for sixpences, than, like Wade, to build up and throw down fortunes, night after night, at the gaming-table. But there was a more celebrated general at the court of the second George than the road-constructing Wade. John Dalrymple, Earl of Stair, was one of those men in high station whose acts tend to the weal or woe of inferior men who imitate them. Stair was for ever gaily allowing his expenditure to exceed his income. His sense of honour was not so keen but that he would go in disguise among the Jacobites, profess to be of them, and betray their confidence. And yet even Lord Stair could act with honest independence. He voted against Walpole’s Excise scheme, in 1733, although he knew that such a vote would cost him all his honours. He was accordingly turned out from his post of lord high admiral for Scotland. Caroline was angry at his vote, yet sorry for its consequences. ‘Why,’ said she to him, ‘why were you so silly as to thwart Walpole’s views?’ ‘Because, madam,’ was the reply, ‘I wished you and your family better than to support such a project.’ Stair merits, too, a word of commendation for his protesting against the merciless conduct of the government with respect to the captive Jacobites; and, like Marlborough, he was of praiseworthy conduct in private life, zealous for Presbyterianism, yet tolerant of all other denominations, and, by his intense attachment to a Protestant succession, one of the most valuable supporters of the throne of George and Caroline. Both the men were consistent; but equal praise cannot be awarded to another good soldier of the period. The Duke of Argyle, when out of office, declared that a standing army, in time of peace, was ever fatal either to prince or nation; subsequently, when in office, he as deliberately maintained that a standing army never had in any country the chief hand in destroying the liberties of the state. This sort of disgraceful versatility marked his entire political career; and it is further said of him that he ‘was meanly ambitious of emolument as a politician, and contemptibly mercenary as a patron.’ He had, however, one rare and by no means unimportant virtue. ‘The strictest economy was enforced in his household, and his tradesmen were punctually paid once a month.’ This virtue was quite enough to purchase sneers for him in the cabinet of King George and the court of Queen Caroline.

In the last year of the reign of that King died General Hawley, whose severity to his soldiers acquired for him in the ranks the title of lord chief justice. An extract from his will may serve to show that the ‘lord chief justice’ had little in him of the Christian soldier. ‘I direct and order that, as there’s now a peace, and I may die the common way, my carcase may be put anywhere, ’tis equal to me; but I will have no more expense or ridiculous show than if a poor soldier, who is as good a man, were to be buried from the hospital. The priest, I conclude, will have his fee—let the puppy take it. Pay the carpenter for the carcase-box. I give to my sister 5,000l. As to my other relations, I have none who want, and as I never was married, I have no heirs; I have, therefore, long since taken it into my head to adopt one son and heir, after the manner of the Romans; who I hereafter name, &c.... I have written all this,’ he adds, ‘with my own hand, and this I do because I hate all priests of all professions, and have the worst opinion of all members of the bar.’

Having glanced at these social traits of men who were among the foremost of those who were above the rank of mere courtiers around the throne of the husband of Caroline, let us quit the palace, and seek for other samples of the people and the times in the prisons, the private houses, and the public streets.

With regard to the prisons, it is easier to tell than to conceive the horrors even of the debtors’ prisons of those days. Out of them, curiously enough, arose the colonisation of the state of Georgia. General Oglethorpe having heard that a friend named Castle, an architect by profession, had died in consequence of the hardships inflicted on him in the Fleet Prison, instituted an enquiry, by which discovery was made of some most iniquitous proceedings. The unfortunate debtors, unable to pay their fees to the gaolers, who had no salary and lived upon what they could extort from the prisoners and their friends, were subjected to torture, chains, and starvation. The authorities of the prison were prosecuted, and penalties of fine and imprisonment laid upon them. A better result was a parliamentary grant, with a public subscription and private donations, whereby Oglethorpe was enabled to found a colony of liberated insolvents in Georgia. Half of the settlers were either insolvent simply because their richer and extravagant debtors neglected to pay their bills; the other half were the victims of their own extravagance.

Bad roads and ill-lighted ways are said to be proofs of indifferent civilisation when they are to be found in the neighbourhood of great cities. If this be so, then civilisation was not greatly advanced among us, in this respect, a century and a quarter ago. Thus we read that on the 21st of November 1730, ‘the King and Queen, coming from Kew Green to St. James’s, were overturned in their coach, near Lord Peterborough’s, at Parson’s Green, about six in the evening, the wind having blown out the flambeaux, so that the coachman could not see his way. But their Majesties received no hurt, nor the two ladies who were in the coach with them.’

If here was want of civilisation, there was positive barbarity in other matters. For instance, here is a paragraph from the news of the day, under date of the 10th of June 1731. ‘Joseph Crook, alias Sir Peter Stranger, stood in the pillory at Charing Cross, for forging a deed; and after he had stood an hour, a chair was brought to the pillory scaffold, in which he was placed, and the hangman with a pruning-knife cut off both his ears, and with a pair of scissors slit both his nostrils, all which he bore with much patience; but when his right nostril was seared with a hot iron, the pain was so violent he could not bear it; whereupon his left nostril was not seared, but he was carried bleeding to a neighbouring tavern, where he was as merry at dinner with his friends, after a surgeon had dressed his wounds, as if nothing of the kind had happened. He was afterwards imprisoned for life in the King’s Bench, and the issues and profits of his lands were confiscated for his life, according to his sentence.’

It was the period when savage punishment was very arbitrarily administered; and shortly after Sir Peter was mangled, without detriment to his gaiety, at Charing Cross, the gallant Captain Petre had very nearly got hanged at Constantinople. That gallant sailor and notable courtier had entertained our ambassador, Lord Kinneal, on board his ship, and honoured him, on leaving the vessel at nine o’clock at night, with a salute of fifteen guns. The Sultan happened to have gone to bed, and was aroused from his early slumbers by the report. He was so enraged, that he ordered the captain to be seized, bastinadoed, and hanged; and so little were King George and Queen Caroline, and England to boot, thought of in Turkey at that day, that it was with the greatest difficulty that the British ambassador could prevail on the Sultan to pardon the offender. The court laughed at the incident. Cromwell would have avenged the affront.

But we must not fancy that we were much less savage in idea or action at home. There was one John Waller, in 1732, who stood in the pillory in Seven Dials, for falsely swearing against persons whom he accused as highway robbers. The culprit was dreadfully pelted during the hour he stood exposed; but at the end of that time the mob tore him down and trampled him to death. Whether this, too, was considered a laughable matter at court is not so certain. Even if so, the courtiers were soon made serious by the universal sickness which prevailed in London in the beginning of the year 1732. Headache and fever were the common symptoms; very few escaped, and a vast number died. In the last week of January, not less than fifteen hundred perished of the epidemic within the bills of mortality. There had not been so severe a visitation since the period of the plague. But our wonder may cease that headache and fever prevailed, when we recollect that gin was being sold, contrary to law, in not less than eight thousand different places in the metropolis, and that drunkenness was not the vice of the lower orders only.

It has been truly said of Queen Caroline that, with all her opportunities, she never abused the power which she held over the King’s mind, by employing it for the promotion of her own friends and favourites. This, however, is but negative, or questionable praise. There is, too, an anecdote extant, the tendency of which is to show that she was somewhat given to the enjoyment of uncontrolledly exercising the power she had attained for her personal purposes. She had prepared plans for enclosing St. James’s Park, shutting out the public, and keeping it for the exclusive pleasure of herself and the royal family. It was by mere chance, when she had matured her plans, that she asked a nobleman connected with the Board which then attended to what our Board of Woods and Forests neglects, what the carrying out of such a plan might cost. ‘Madam,’ said the witty and right-seeing functionary, ‘such a plan might cost three crowns.’ Caroline was as ready of wit as he, and not only understood the hint, but showed she could apply it, by abandoning her intention.

And yet, she doubtless did so with regret, for gardens and their arrangement were her especial delight; and she did succeed in taking a portion of Hyde Park from the public, and throwing the same into Kensington Gardens. The Queen thought she compensated for depriving the public of land by giving them more water. There was a rivulet which ran through the park; and this she converted, by help from Hampstead streams and land drainage near at hand, into what is so magniloquently styled the Serpentine river. It is not a river, nor is it serpentine, except by a slight twist of the imagination.

This Queen was equally busy with her gardens at Richmond and at Kew. The King used to praise her for effecting great wonders at little cost; but she contrived to squeeze contributions from the ministry, of which the monarch knew nothing. She had a fondness, too, rather than a taste, for garden architecture, and was given to build grottoes and crowd them with statues. The droll juxtaposition into which she brought the counterfeit presentments of defunct sages, warriors, and heroes caused much amusement to the beholders generally.

There was one child of George and Caroline more especially anxious than any other to afford her widowed father consolation on the death of the Queen. That child was the haughty Anne, Princess of Orange. She had strong, but most unreasonable, hopes of succeeding to the influence which had so long been enjoyed by her royal mother; and she came over in hot haste from Holland, on the plea of benefiting her health, which was then in a precarious state. The King, however, was quite a match for his ambitious and presuming child, and peremptorily rejected her proffered condolence. This was done with such prompt decision, that the princess was compelled to return to Holland immediately. The King would not allow her, it is said, to pass a second night in the metropolis. He probably remembered her squabbles with his father’s ‘favourite,’ Miss Brett; and the disconsolate man was not desirous of having his peace disturbed by the renewal of similar scenes with his own ‘favourite,’ Lady Yarmouth.

Of all the eulogies passed upon Caroline, few were so profuse in their laudation as that contained in a sermon preached before the council at Boston, in America, by the Rev. Samuel Mather. There was not a virtue known which the transatlantic chaplain did not attribute to her. As woman, the minister pronounced her perfect; as queen, she was that and sublime to boot. As regent, she possessed, for the time, the King’s wisdom added to her own. Good Mr. Mather, too, is warrant for the soundness of her faith; and he applied to her the words in Judith: ‘There was none that gave her an ill word, for she feared God greatly.’

William III. is recorded as having said of his consort, Mary, that if he could believe any mortal was born without the contagion of sin, he would believe it of the queen. Upon citing which passage, the Bostonian exclaims: ‘And oh, gracious Caroline, thy respected consort was ready to make the same observation of thee; so pure, so chaste, so religious wast thou, and so in all good things exemplary, amidst the excesses of a magnificent court, and in an age of luxury and wantonness!’ And he thus proceeds: ‘The pious Queen was constant at her secret devotions; and she loved the habitation of God’s house; and from regard to the divine institutions, with delight and steadiness attended on them. And as she esteemed and practised every duty of piety towards the Almighty, so she detested and frowned on every person and thing that made but an appearance of what was wicked and impious. As she performed every duty incumbent on her towards her beloved subjects, so she deeply reverenced the King; and while his Majesty honours her and will grieve for her to his last moments, her royal offspring rise up and call her blessed.’

‘Seven are the children,’ said the preacher, ‘which she has left behind her. These, like the noble Roman Cornelia, she took to be her chief ornaments. Accordingly, it was both her care and her pleasure to improve their minds and form their manners, that so they might hereafter prove blessings to the nation and the world. What a lovely, heavenly sight must it have been to behold the majestic royal matron, with her faithful and obsequious offspring around her! So the planetary orbs about the sun gravitate towards it, keep their proper distance from it, and receive from it the measures of light and influence respectively belonging to them. Such was—oh, fatal grief!—such was the late most excellent Queen.’

The issue of the marriage of Caroline and George II. comprised four sons and five daughters—namely, Frederick Louis, Prince of Wales, born January 20, 1706; Anne, Princess of Orange, born October 22, 1708; Amelia Sophia, born June 10, 1711; Caroline Elizabeth, born May 31, 1713; William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, born April 15, 1721; the Princess Mary, born February 22, 1723; the Princess Louisa, born December 7, 1724. All these survived the Queen. There was also a prince born in November 1716, who did not survive his birth; and George William, Duke of Gloucester, born November 2, 1717, who died in February of the year following.

At the funeral of Caroline, which was called ‘decently private,’ but which was, in truth, marked by much splendour and ceremony, not the King, but the Princess Amelia, acted as chief mourner; and the anthem, ‘The Ways of Zion do mourn,’ was ‘set to Musick by Mr. Handell.’ Of all the verses poured out on the occasion of her death, two specimens are subjoined. They show how the Queen was respectively dealt with by the Democritus and Heraclitus of her subjects:—