The social happiness of Caroline began now to be affected by the conduct of her son Frederick, Prince of Wales. Since his arrival in England, in 1728, he had been but coolly entertained by his parents, who refused to pay the debts he had accumulated in Hanover previous to his leaving the Electorate. He was soon in the arms of the opposition; and the court had no more violent an enemy, political or personal, than this prince.

His conduct, however—and some portion of it was far from being unprovoked—did not prevent the court from entering into some social enjoyments of a harmless and not over-amusing nature. Among these may be reckoned the ‘readings’ at Windsor Castle. These readings consisted of the poetry, or verses rather, of that Stephen Duck, the thresher, whose rhymes Swift has ridiculed in lines as weak as any which ever fell from the pen of Duck. The latter was a Wiltshire labourer, who supported, or tried to support, a family upon the modest wages of four-and-sixpence a week. In his leisure hours, whenever those could have occurred, he cultivated poetry; and two of his pieces, ‘The Shunamite’ and ‘The Thresher’s Labour,’ were publicly read in the drawing-room at Windsor Castle, in 1730, by Lord Macclesfield. Caroline procured for the poet the office of yeoman of the guard, and afterwards made him keeper of her grotto, Merlin’s Cave, at Richmond. This last act, and the patronage and pounds which Caroline wasted upon the wayward and worthless savage, show that Swift’s epigram upon the busts in the hermitage at Richmond was not based upon truth—

Swift’s anger against the Queen, who once promised him some medals, but who never kept her word, and from whom he had hoped, perhaps, for a patronage which he failed to acquire, was further illustrated about this time in a fiercely satirical poem, in which he says:—

And, in allusion to the princesses and their prospects, he adds, that Caroline ‘hath graces of her own:’—

The royal patronage of Duck ultimately raised him to the church, and made of him Vicar of Kew. But it failed to bring to the thresher substantial happiness. He had little enjoyment in the station to which he was elevated; and, weary of the restraints it imposed on him, he ultimately escaped from them by drowning himself.

Of the Graces who were the daughters of Caroline, the marriage of one began now to be canvassed. Meanwhile, there was much food for mere talk in common passing events at home. The courtiers had to express sympathy at their Majesties’ being upset in their carriage, when travelling only from Kew to London. Then the son of a Stuart had just died in London. He was that Duke of Cleveland who was the eldest son of Charles II. and Barbara Villiers. In the year 1731 died two far more remarkable people. On the 8th of April ‘Mrs. Elizabeth Cromwell, daughter of Richard Cromwell, the Protector, and grand-daughter of Oliver Cromwell, died at her house in Bedford Row, in the eighty-second year of her age.’ In the same month passed away a man whose writings as much amused Caroline as they have done commoner people—Defoe. He had a not much superior intellectual training to that of Stephen Duck, but he was ‘one of the best English writers that ever had so mean an education.’ The deaths in the same year of the eccentric and profligate Duke of Wharton, and of the relict of that Duke of Monmouth who lost his head for rebellion against James II., gave further subject of conversation in the court circle; where, if it was understood that death was inevitable and necessary, no one could understand what had induced Dr. Nichols, of Trinity College, Cambridge, to steal books from the libraries in that university town. The court was highly merry at the precipitate flight of the doctor, after he was found out; but there was double the mirth the next year at the awkwardness of the Emperor of Germany, who, happening to fire at a stag, chanced to shoot Prince Schwartzenberg, his master of the horse. But we turn from these matters to those of wooing and marriage.

In the year 1733 the proud and eldest daughter of Caroline, she who had expressed her vexation at having brothers, who stood between her and the succession to the crown—a crown, to wear which for a day, she averred she would willingly die when the day was over—in the year above named, the Princess Anne had reached the mature age of twenty-four, and her hand yet remained disengaged. Neither crown nor suitor had yet been placed at her disposal. A suitor with a crown was once, however, very nearly on the point of fulfilling the great object of her ambition, and that when she was not more than sixteen years of age. The lover proposed was no less a potentate than Louis XV., and he would have offered her a seat on a throne, which, proud as she was, she might have accepted without much condescension.

It is said that the proposal to unite Louis XV. and the Princess Anne originated with the French minister, the Duke de Bourbon, and that the project was entertained with much favour and complacency, until it suddenly occurred to some one that if the princess became queen in France, she would be expected to conform to the religion of France. This, it was urged, could not be thought of by a family which was a reigning family only by virtue of its pre-eminent Protestantism. It does not seem to have occurred to any one that when Maria Henrietta espoused Charles I., she had not been even asked to become a professed member of the Church of England, and that we might have asked for the same toleration in France for the daughter of Caroline as had been given in England to the daughter of the ‘Grand Henri.’ However this may be, the affair was not pursued to its end, and Caroline could not say to her daughter, as Stanislas said to his on the morning he received an offer for her from the young King Louis:—‘Bon jour! ma fille: vous êtes Reine de France!’

Anne was unlucky. She lived moodily on for some half-dozen years, and, nothing more advantageous offering, she looked good-naturedly on one of the ugliest princes in Europe. But then he happened to be a sovereign prince in his way. This was the Prince of Orange, who resembled Alexander the Great only in having a wry neck and a halt in his gait. But he also had other deformities from which the Macedonian was free.

George and Caroline were equally indisposed to accept the prince for a son-in-law, and the parental disinclination was expressed in words to the effect that neither King nor Queen would force the feelings of their daughter, whom they left free to accept or reject the misshapen suitor who aspired to the plump hand and proud person of the Princess Anne.

The lady thought of her increasing years; that lovers were not to be found on every bush, especially sovereign lovers; and, remembering that there were Princesses of England before her who had contrived to live in much state and a certain degree of happiness as Princesses of Orange, she declared her intention of following the same course, and compelling her ambition to stoop to the same modest fortune.

The Queen was well aware that her daughter knew nothing more of the prince than what she could collect from his counterfeit presentments limned by flattering artists; and Caroline suggested that she should not be too ready to accept a lover whom she had not seen. The princess was resolute in her determination to take him at once, ‘for better, for worse.’ Her royal father was somewhat impatient and chafed by such pertinacity, and exclaimed that the prince was the ugliest man in Holland, and he could not more terribly describe him. ‘I do not care,’ said she, ‘how ugly he may be. If he were a Dutch baboon I would marry him.’ ‘Nay, then, have your way,’ said George, in his strong Westphalian accent, which was always rougher and stronger when he was vexed; ‘have your way: you will find baboon enough, I promise you!’

Could the aspiring Prince of Orange only have heard how amiably he was spoken of en famille by his future relations, he would perhaps have been less ambitious of completing the alliance. Happily these family secrets were not revealed until long after he could be conscious of them, and accordingly his honest proposals were accepted with ostentatious respect and ill-covered ridicule.

The marriage of the princess royal could not be concluded without an application to parliament. To both houses a civil intimation was made of the proposed union of the Princess Anne and the Prince of Orange. In this intimation the King graciously mentioned that he promised himself the concurrence and assistance of the Commons to enable him to give such a portion with his eldest daughter as should be suitable to the occasion. The Commons’ committee promised to do all that the King and Queen could expect from them, and they therefore came to the resolution to sell lands in the island of St. Christopher to the amount of 80,000l., and to make over that sum to the King, as the dowry of his eldest daughter. The resolution made part of a bill of which it was only one of the items, and the members in the house affected to be scandalised that the dowry of a Princess of England should be ‘lumped in’ among a mass of miscellaneous items—charities to individuals, grants to old churches, and sums awarded for less dignified purposes. But the bill passed as it stood, and Caroline, who only a few days before had sent a thousand pounds to the provost of Queen’s College, Oxford, for the rebuilding and adorning of that college, was especially glad to find a dowry for her daughter, in whatever company it might come, provided only it was not out of her own purse.

The news of the securing of the dowry hastened the coming of the bridegroom. On the 7th of November 1732 he arrived at Greenwich, and thence proceeded to Somerset House. His intended wife, when she heard of his arrival, was in no hurry to meet him, but went on at her harpsichord, surrounded by a number of opera-people. The Queen spoke of him as ‘that animal!’ The nuptials were to have been speedily solemnised, but the lover fell grievously sick. When the poor ‘groom’ fell sick, not one of the royal family condescended to visit him, and though he himself maintained a dignified silence on this insulting conduct, his suite, who could not imitate their master’s indifference, made comment thereupon loud and frequent enough. They got nothing by it, save being called Dutch boobies. The princess royal exhibited no outward manifestation either of consciousness or sympathy. She appeared precisely the same under all contingencies; and whether the lover were in or out of England, in life or out of it, seemed to this strong-minded lady to be one and the same thing.

There was no one whom the postponement of the marriage more annoyed than it did the Duchess of Marlborough. She was then residing in Marlborough House, which had been built some five-and-twenty years previously by Wren. That architect was employed, not because he was preferred, but that Vanbrugh might be vexed. The ground, in which had formerly been kept the birds and fowls ultimately destined to pass through the kitchen to the royal table, had been leased to the duchess by Queen Anne, and the expenses of building amounted to nearly fifty thousand pounds. The duchess both experienced and caused considerable mortifications here. She used to speak of the King in the adjacent palace as her ‘neighbour George.’ The entrance to the house, from Pall Mall, was, as it still is, a crooked and inconvenient one. To remedy this defect, she intended to purchase some houses ‘in the Priory,’ as the locality was called, for the purpose of pulling them down and constructing a more commodious entry to the mansion; but Sir Robert Walpole, with no more dignified motive than spite, secured the houses and ground, and erected buildings on the latter, which, as now, completely blocked in the front of the duchess’s mansion. She was subjected to a more temporary, but as inconvenient, blockade when the preparations for the wedding of the imperious Anne and her ugly husband were going on. Among other preparations a boarded gallery, through which the nuptial procession was to pass, was built up close against the duchess’s windows, completely darkening her rooms. As the boards remained there during the postponement of the ceremony, the duchess used to look at them with the remark, ‘I wish the princess would oblige me by taking away her orange chest!’

But the sick bridegroom took long to mend; and it was not till the following January that he was even sufficiently convalescent to journey by easy stages to Bath, and there drink in health at the fashionable pump. A month’s attendance there restored him to something like health; and in February his serene highness was gravely disporting himself at Oxford, exchanging compliments and eating dinners with the sages and scholars at that seat of learning. Another month was allowed to pass, and then, on the 24th of March 1733, the royal marriage was solemnised ‘in the French Chapel,’ St. James’s, by the Bishop of London.

The ceremony was as theatrical and coarse as such things used to be in those days. The prince must have looked very much as M. Potier used to look in Riquet à la Houppe, before his transformation from deformity to perfection. He was attired in a ‘cloth of gold suit;’ and George and Caroline may be pardoned if they smiled at the ‘baboon’ whom they were about to accept for their son-in-law. The bride was ‘in virgin robes of silver tissue, having a train six yards long, which was supported by ten dukes’ and earls’ daughters, all of whom were attired in robes of silver tissue.’

Nature will assert its claims in spite of pride or expediency; and accordingly it was observed that, after the bridegroom had arrived, and the marriage procession began to move through the temporarily constructed gallery, blazing with light, and glittering with bright gems and brighter eyes, the bride herself seemed slightly touched, and Caroline especially grave and anxious in her deportment. She appeared, for the first time, to feel that her daughter was about to make a great sacrifice, and her consequent anxiety was probably increased by the conviction that it was too late to save her daughter from impending fate. The King himself, who had never been in the eager condition of the seigneur in the song, who so peremptorily exclaims—

manifested more impassibility than ever. Finally, the knot was tied under a salvo of artillery and a world of sighs.

The ceremony took place in the evening, and at midnight the royal family supped in public. It was a joyous festival, and not before two in the morning did the jaded married couple retire to the bower prepared for them, where they had to endure the further nuisance of sitting up in bed, in rich undresses, while the court and nobility, ‘fresh’ from an exhilarating supper and strong wines, defiled before them, making pleasant remarks the while, as ‘fine gentlemen’ used to make who had been born in our Augustan age.

Caroline felt compassion for her daughter, but she restrained her feelings until her eye fell upon the bridegroom. In his silver tissue night-dress, his light peruque, his ugliness, and his deformity, he struck her as the impersonation of a monster. His ill figure was so ill-dressed, that, looked at from behind, he appeared to have no head, and seen from before, he appeared as if he had neither neck nor legs.8 The Queen was wonderfully moved at the sight—moved with pity for her daughter, and with indignation at her husband. The portion of the ceremony which used to be the merriest was by far the most mournful, at least so far as the Queen’s participation therein was concerned. She fairly cried with mingled vexation, disappointment, and disgust. She could not even revert to the subject, for days after, without crying, and yet laughing too, as the oddity of the bridegroom’s ugliness came across her mind.

The married couple were assuredly a strangely assorted pair. The bride, indeed, was not without common-place charms. In common with a dairy-maid the princess had a lively clear look and a very fair complexion. Like many a dairy-maid, too, of the time, she was very much marked with the small-pox. She was also ill-made, and inclined to become as obese as her royal mother. But then the bridegroom! All writers dealing with the subject agree that his ugliness was something extraordinary. No one doubts that he was deformed; but Hervey adds some traits that are revolting. His serene highness did not, like the gods, distil a celestial ichor. He appears, however, not to have been void of sense or good feeling; for when, at the period of his arrival, he was received with very scanty honours and cold ceremony—was made to feel that he was nothing in himself, and could only become anything here by marrying an English princess; when George, if not Caroline, ‘snubbed’ the courtiers who crowded his apartments at Somerset House; and when, in short, the prince of 12,000l. a year was made to feel that but little value was set upon him—he bore it all in silence, or as if he did not perceive it. Let us hope that gallantry for the lady induced the princely Quasimodo thus to act. It was almost more than she deserved; for while the people were ready to believe that the alliance was entered into the better to strengthen the Protestant succession, Anne herself was immediately moved thereto by fear, if she were left single, of ultimately depending for a provision upon her brother Frederick.

Lord Hervey was the master of the ceremonies on this serio-comic occasion. According to his table of precedence, the Irish peers were to walk in the procession after the entire body of the peerage of Great Britain. This was putting the highest Irish peer beneath the lowest baron in Britain. The Hibernian lords claimed to walk immediately after the English and Scotch peers of their own degree. It was the most modest claim ever made by that august body; but, modest as it was, the arrogant peers of Great Britain threatened, if the claim were allowed, to absent themselves from the ceremony altogether! The case was represented to Caroline, and she took the side of right and common sense; but when she was told that to allow the Irish claim would be to banish every British peer from the solemn ceremony, she was weak enough to give way. Lord Hervey, in his programme for the occasion, omitted to make any mention of the peers of Ireland at all—thus leaving them to walk where they could. On being remonstrated with, he said that if the Irish lords were not satisfied he would keep all the finery standing, and they might walk through it in any order of precedency they liked on the day after the wedding. One lord grievously complained of the omission of the illustrious Hibernian body from the programme. Lord Hervey excused himself by remarking, that as the Irish house of peers was then sitting in Dublin, he never thought, being an Englishman, of the august members of that assembly being in two places at once.

The claim was probably disallowed because Ireland was not then in union with England, as Scotland was. On no other ground could the claim have been refused; and Caroline saw that even that ground was not a very good one whereon to rest a denial. As it was, the Irish peers felt like poor relations, neither invited to nor prohibited from the joyous doings, but with a thorough conviction that, to use a popular phrase, their room was deemed preferable to their company.

During the week following the marriage, Frederick, Prince of Wales, was employed, after a fashion which suited his tastes extremely well, in escorting his brother-in-law to witness the sights of London. It then appears to have suddenly struck the government that it would be as well to make an Englishman of the bridegroom, and that that consummation could not be too quickly arrived at. Accordingly, a bill for naturalising the prince was brought in and read three times on the same day. It, of course, passed unanimously, and the prince received the intelligence of his having been converted into a Briton with a phlegm which showed that he had not altogether ceased to be a Dutchman.

He was much more pleasurably excited in the April of the following year, when he heard that the King had sent a written message to the Commons, intimating that he had settled five thousand a year on the princess royal, and desiring that they would enable him to make the grant for the life of the princess, as it would otherwise determine on his Majesty’s death. The Commons complied with this message, and the Prince of Orange was infinitely more delighted with this Act than with that which bestowed on him the legal rights of an Englishman.

This pleasant little arrangement having been concluded, the prince and princess set out for Holland, from St. James’s, on the 10th of April 1734; and in July of the same year the princess was again in England, not at all to the satisfaction of her sire, and but very scantily to the delight of her mother. The young lady, however, was determined to remain; and it was not till November that she once more returned to her home behind the dykes. The Queen was not sorry to part with her, for just then she was deep in the fracas connected with the dismissal of her husband’s ‘favourite,’ Lady Suffolk, from her office of mistress of the robes to her Majesty, an office in which she was succeeded by the more worthy Countess of Tankerville. The King had the less time to be troubled with thought about ‘that old deaf woman,’ as he very ungallantly used to call his ancient ‘favourite,’ as he, too, was deeply engaged in protesting against the Elector Palatine, who had been very vigorously protesting against the right of the King, as Elector of Hanover, to bear the title of arch-treasurer of the empire.

The commiseration which the Queen had felt for her daughter was shared by the sister of the latter, the Princess Amelia, who declared that nothing on earth could have induced her to wed with such a man as the Prince of Orange. Her declaration was accepted for as much as it was worth. The gentle Princess Caroline, on the other hand, thought that her sister, under the circumstances, had acted wisely, and that, had she been so placed, she would have acted in like manner. Nor did the conduct of the bride give the world any reason to think that she stood in need of pity. She appeared to adore the ‘monster,’ who, it must be confessed, exhibited no particular regard for his spouse. The homage she paid him was perfect. ‘She made prodigious court to him,’ says Lord Hervey, ‘addressed everything she said to him, and applauded everything he said to anybody else.’

Perhaps the pride of the princess would not permit a doubt to be thrown upon her supreme happiness. Her brother Frederick strove to mar it by raising a quarrel, on a slight, but immensely absurd, foundation. He reproached her for the double fault of presuming to be married before him, and of accepting a settlement from her father when he had none. He was ingenious in finding fault; but there may have been a touch of satire in this, for Anne was known to have been as groundlessly angry with her brother for a circumstance which he could not very well help, namely, his own birth, whereby the princess royal ceased to be next heir to the crown.

The prince, however, was not much addicted to showing respect to anybody, least of all to his mother. It was because of this miserable want of respect for the Queen that the King, in an interview forced on him by his son, refused to settle a fixed annuity upon him—at least till he had manifested a more praiseworthy conduct towards the Queen.

The anxiety of Frederick on this occasion was not unnatural, for he was deeply in debt, and of the 100,000l. granted to the prince by parliament out of the civil list, the King allowed him only 36,000l. The remainder was appropriated by the King, who doubtless made his son’s conduct the rule of his liberality, measuring his supplies to the prince according as the latter was well or ill behaved. It was a degrading position enough, and the degradation was heightened by the silent contempt with which the King passed over his son’s application to be permitted to join in active service. Throughout these first family quarrels, the Queen preserved a great impartiality, with some leaning, perhaps, towards serving her son. Nothing, however, came of it; and, for the moment, Frederick was fain to be content with doing the honours of the metropolis to his ungraceful brother-in-law.

The congratulatory addresses which were presented on the occasion of the marriage had a mordantly satirical tone about them. It is wonderful how George and Caroline, whose unpopularity was increasing at this time, continued to preserve their equanimity at hearing praises rung on the name and services of ‘Orange’—the name of a prince who had become King of England by rendering the questionable service to his father-in-law of turning him off the throne.

The address of the Lords to the Queen, especially congratulating the mother on the marriage of her daughter, was rendered painful instead of pleasant by its being presented, that is spoken, to her by Lord Chesterfield. Caroline had never seen this peer since the time he was dismissed from her husband’s household, when she was Princess of Wales. He had not been presented at court since the accession of the present Sovereign, and the Queen was therefore resolved to treat as an utter stranger the man who had been impertinent enough to declare he designed that the step he took should be considered as a compliment to the Queen. The latter abhorred him, nevertheless, for his present attempt to turn the compliment addressed to her by the Lords into a joke. Before he appeared, Caroline intimated her determination not to let the peer’s cool impertinence awe or disconcert her. He really did find what she declared he should, that ‘it was as little in his power for his presence to embarrass her as for his raillery behind her back to pique her, or his consummate skill in politics to distress the King or his ministers.’9

The Queen acted up to this resolution. She received Lords Chesterfield, Scarborough, and Hardwicke, the bearers of the address, in her bedchamber, no one else being present but her children and Lord Hervey, who stood behind her chair. The last-named nobleman, in describing the scene, says: ‘Lord Chesterfield’s speech was well written and well got by heart, and yet delivered with a faltering voice, a face as white as a sheet, and every limb trembling with concern. The Queen’s answer was quiet and natural, and delivered with the same ease that she would have spoken to the most indifferent person in her circle.’

Caroline, however, had more serious matters to attend to during this year than affairs of marriage. Of these we will now briefly speak.

Sir Robert Walpole’s celebrated Excise scheme was prolific in raising political agitations and exciting both political and personal passions. The Peers were, strangely enough, even more resolute against the measure than the Commons; or perhaps it would be more correct to say, that a portion of them took advantage of the popular feeling to further thereby their own particular interests and especial objects.

It is again illustrative of the power and influence of Caroline, and of the esteem in which she was held, that a body of the peers delegated Lord Stair to proceed to the Queen, at Kensington, and remonstrate with her upon the unconstitutional and destructive measure, as they designated the Excise project.

Lord Stair was a bold man and was accustomed to meet and contend with sovereigns. He had no doubt of being able to turn Caroline to his purpose. But never did delegate perform his mission so awkwardly. He thought to awaken the Queen’s indignation against Walpole by imparting to her the valuable admonitory knowledge that she was ruled by that subtle statesman. He fancied he improved his position by informing her that Walpole was universally hated, that he was no gentleman, and that he was as ill-looking as he was ill-inclined. He even forgot his mission, save when he spoke of fidelity to his constituents, by going into purely personal matters, railing at the minister whose very shoe-buckles he had kissed in order to be appointed vice-admiral of Scotland, when the Duke of Queensberry was ejected from that post, and accusing Walpole of being manifestly untrue to the trust which he held, seeing that whenever there was an office to dispose of, he invariably preferred giving it to the Campbells rather than to him—Stair. To the Campbells!—he reiterated, as if the very name were enough to rouse Caroline against Walpole. To the Campbells! who tried to rule England by means of the King’s mistress; opposed to governing it by means of the King’s wife.

Caroline heard him with decent and civil patience until he had gone through his list of private grievances, and began to meddle with matters personal to herself and the royal hearth. She then burst forth, and was superb in her rebuke—superb in its matter and manner—superb in her dignity and in the severity with which she crushed Lord Stair beneath her fiery sarcasms and her withering contempt. She ridiculed his assertions of fidelity, and told him he had become traitor to his own country and the betrayer of his own constituents. She mocked his complacent assurances that his object was not personal, but patriotic. She professed her intense abhorrence of having the private dissensions of noblemen ripped open in her presence, and bade him learn better manners than to speak, as he had done, of ‘the King’s servants to the King’s wife.’

‘My conscience,’ said Lord Stair.

‘Don’t talk to me of your conscience, my lord,’ said Caroline, ‘or I shall faint.’ The conversation was in French, and the Queen’s precise words were, ‘Ne me parlez point de conscience, milord; vous me faites évanouir.’

The Scottish lord was sadly beaten down, and confessed his disgraceful defeat by requesting her Majesty to be good enough to keep what had passed at the interview as a secret. He added, in French, ‘Madame, le Roi est trompé et vous êtes trahie’—‘The King is deceived and you are betrayed.’ He had previously alluded to Lords Bolingbroke and Carteret, as men worthy indeed to be trusted, and who had the honour and glory of the kingdom at heart. These names, with such testimonial attached to them, especially excited the royal indignation. ‘Bolingbroke and Carteret!’ exclaimed Caroline. ‘You may tell them from me, if you will, that they are men of no parts; that they are said to be two of the greatest liars in any country; and that my observation and experience confirm what is said of them.’10

Stair reiterated his request that the incidents of the private interview should not be further spoken of. Caroline consented; and she must have felt some contempt for him as he also promised that he would keep them secret, giving knowledge thereof to no man.

‘Well?’ said Carteret, enquiringly, as he met with Lord Stair after this notable interview with Caroline.

‘Well!’ exclaimed Lord Stair, ‘I have staggered her!’ A pigmy might as well have boasted of having staggered Thalestris and Hippolyta.

A short time subsequently Lord Hervey was with the Queen, in her apartment, purveying to her, as he was wont to do, the floating news of the day. Among other things, he told her of an incident in a debate in parliament upon the army supplies. In the course of the discussion, Carteret had observed that, at the period when Cardinal Mazarin was ruining France by his oppressive measures, a great man sought an audience of the Queen (Anne of Austria, mother of the young King Louis XIV.), and after explaining to her the perils of the times, ended with the remark that she was maintaining a man at the helm who deserved to be rowing in the galleys.

Caroline immediately knew that Lord Stair had revealed what he had petitioned her to keep secret; and feeling that she was thereby exonerated from observing further silence, her Majesty took the opportunity to ‘out with it all,’ as she said in not less choice French: ‘J’ai pris la première occasion d’égosiller tout.’

Reverting to Carteret’s illustration she observed that the ‘great man’ noticed by him was Condé, a man who never had a word to say against Mazarin as long as the cardinal fed a rapacity which could never be satisfied. This was, in some degree, Stair’s position with regard to Walpole. ‘Condé, in his interview with the Queen of France,’ observed the well-read Queen of England, ‘had for his object to impose upon her and France, by endeavouring to persuade her that his private resentments were only a consequence of his zeal for the public service.’

Lord Hervey, very gallantly and courtier-like, expressed his wish that her Majesty could have been in the house to let the senate know her wisdom; or that she could have been concealed there, to have had the opportunity of saying, with Agrippine—

The quotation, perhaps, could not have been altogether applicable, but as Lord Hervey quoted it, and ‘my lord’ was a man of wit, it is doubtless as well-placed as wit could make it. The Queen, at all events, took it as a compliment, laughed, and declared, that often when she was with these impatient fellows, ever ready with their unreasonable remonstrances, she was tempted herself to say, with Agrippine, that she was—

a quotation less applicable even than the former, but in which Lord Hervey detected such abundance of wit that he went into a sort of ecstasy of delight at the Queen’s judgment, humour, knowledge, and ability.

When the Excise bill was for the first time brought before the house, the debate lasted till one in the morning. Lord Hervey, during the evening, wrote an account of its progress to the King and Queen; and when he repaired to the palace at the conclusion of the discussion, the King kept him in the Queen’s bed-chamber, talking over the scene, till three o’clock in the morning, and never for a moment remembered that the hungry intelligencer had not dined since the yesterday.

When the clamour against the bill rose to such a pitch that all England, the army included, seemed ready to rise against it, Walpole offered himself as a personal sacrifice, if the service and interests of the King would be promoted by his surrender of office and power. It is again illustrative of the influence of Caroline that this offer was made to her and not to the King. He was in truth the Queen’s minister; and nobly she stood by him. When Walpole made the offer in question, Caroline declared that she would not be so mean, so cowardly, or so ungrateful as to abandon him; and she infused the same spirit into the King. The latter had intended, from the first, to reign and govern, and be effectively his own minister; but Caroline so wrought upon him that he thought he had of himself reached the conviction that it was necessary for him to trust in a minister, and that Walpole was the fittest man for such an office. And so he grew to love the very man whom he had been wont to hold in his heart’s extremest hate. He would even occasionally speak of him as a ‘noble fellow,’ and, with tears in his eyes, would listen to an account of some courageous stand Walpole had made in the house against the enemies of the government, and he would add the while a running commentary of sobs.

The Queen’s greatest triumph was this overcoming of her husband’s personal hatred for Walpole. It could not have been an achievement easy to be accomplished. But her art in effecting such achievements was supreme, and she alone could turn to her own purpose the caprices of a hot-headed man, of whom it has been said, that he was of iron obstinacy, but that he was unlike iron in this, that the hotter he became the more impossible it was to bend him. Caroline found him pliant when she found him cool. But then, too, he was most wary, and it was necessary so to act as to cause every turn which she compelled him to make appear to himself as if it were the result of his own unbiassed volition.

Supremely able as Caroline was, she could not, however, always conceal her emotion. Thus, at this very period of the agitation of the Excise bill, on being told, at one of her evening drawing-rooms, of the difficulties and dangers which beset the path of the government, she burst into tears, became unusually excited, and finally affecting, and perhaps feeling, headache and vapours, she broke up her quadrille party, and betrayed in her outward manner an apparent conviction of impending calamity. She evinced the same weakness on being told, on a subsequent evening, that Walpole was in a majority of only seventeen. Such a small majority she felt was a defeat; and, on this occasion, she again burst into tears, and for the first time expressed a fear that the court must give way! The sovereign was, at the same time, as strong within her as the woman; and when she heard of the subordinate holders of government posts voting against the minister or declining to vote with him, she bitterly denounced them, exclaiming, that they who refused to march with their leader were as guilty as they who openly deserted, and that both merited condign punishment.11

The King on this occasion was as excited as his consort, but he manifested his feelings in a different way. He made Lord Hervey repeat the names of those who thwarted the views of the crown, and he grunted forth an angry commentary at each name. ‘Lord John Cavendish,’ began Hervey. ‘A fool!’ snorted the King. ‘Lord Charles Cavendish.’ ‘Half mad!’ ‘Sir William Lowther.’ ‘A whimsical fellow!’ ‘Sir Thomas Prendergast.’ ‘An Irish blockhead!’ ‘Lord Tyrconnel.’ ‘A puppy,’ said George, ‘who never votes twice on the same side!’

On the other hand, the populace made their comment on the proceedings of the court. It was rendered in a highly popular way, and with much significancy. In the city of London, for instance, the mob hung in effigy Sir Robert Walpole and a fat woman. The male figure was duly ticketed. The female effigy was well understood to mean the Queen.

Her power would, after all, not have followed in its fall that of Walpole. Lord Hervey remarks, that had he retired, Caroline would have placed before the King the names of a new ministry, and that the administration would not have hung together a moment after it had outlived her liking.

In the meantime her indefatigability was great. At the suggestion, it is supposed, of Walpole, she sent for the Bishop of Salisbury, Dr. Hoadly, who repaired to the interview with his weak person and stately independence, if one may so speak, upheld by his ‘crutched stick.’ His power must have been considered very great, and so must his caprice; for he was frequently sent for by Caroline, remonstrated with for supposed rebellion, or urged to exert all his good offices in support of the crown. It is difficult to believe that the lengthy speeches reported by Hervey were actually delivered by Queen and bishop. There is nothing longer in Livy, and we are not told that any one took them down. Substantially, however, they may be true. The Queen was insinuating, complimentary, suggestive, and audacious; the bishop all duty, submission, and promise—as far as his consistency and principles could be engaged. But, after all, the immense mountain of anxiety and stratagem was reared in vain, for Walpole withdrew his bill, and Caroline felt that England was but nominally a monarchy.