In spite of the King’s increased ill-temper towards the Queen, and in spite of what Sir Robert Walpole thought and said upon that delicate subject, Lord Hervey maintains that at this very time the King’s heart, as affected towards the Queen, was not less warm than his temper. The facts which are detailed by the gentle official immediately after he has made this assertion go strongly to disprove the latter. The detail involves a rather long extract; but its interest, and the elaborate minuteness with which this picture of a royal interior is painted, will doubtless be considered ample excuse for reproducing the passages. Lord Hervey was eye and ear-witness of what he here so well describes:—

‘About nine o’clock every night the King used to return to the Queen’s apartment from that of his daughter’s, where, from the time of Lady Suffolk’s disgrace, he used to pass those evenings he did not go to the opera or play at quadrille, constraining them, tiring himself, and talking a little indecently to Lady Deloraine, who was always of the party.

‘At his return to the Queen’s side, the Queen used often to send for Lord Hervey to entertain them till they retired, which was generally at eleven. One evening among the rest, as soon as Lord Hervey came into the room, the Queen, who was knotting, while the King walked backwards and forwards, began jocosely to attack Lord Hervey upon an answer just published to a book of his friend Bishop Hoadly’s on the Sacrament, in which the bishop was very ill-treated; but before she had uttered half what she had a mind to say, the King interrupted her, and told her she always loved talking of such nonsense, and things she knew nothing of; adding, that if it were not for such foolish people loving to talk of these things when they were written, the fools who wrote upon them would never think of publishing their nonsense, and disturbing the government with impertinent disputes that nobody of any sense ever troubled himself about. The Queen bowed, and said, “Sir, I only did it to let Lord Hervey know that his friend’s book had not met with that general approbation he had pretended.” “A pretty fellow for a friend!” said the King, turning to Lord Hervey. “Pray what is it that charms you in him? His pretty limping gait?” And then he acted the bishop’s lameness, and entered upon some unpleasant defects which it is not necessary to repeat. The stomachs of the listeners must have been strong, if they experienced no qualm at the too graphic and nasty detail. “Or is it,” continued the King, “his great honesty that charms your lordship? His asking a thing of me for one man, and when he came to have it in his own power to bestow, refusing the Queen to give it to the very man for whom he had asked it? Or do you admire his conscience, that makes him now put out a book that, till he was Bishop of Winchester, for fear his conscience might hurt his preferment, he kept locked up in his chest? Is his conscience so much improved beyond what it was when he was Bishop of Bangor, or Hereford, or Salisbury—for this book, I fear, was written so long ago—or is it that he would not risk losing a shilling a year more whilst there was anything better to be got than what he had? I cannot help saying, that if the Bishop of Winchester is your friend, you have a great puppy, and a very dull fellow, and a great rascal, for your friend. It is a very pretty thing for such scoundrels, when they are raised by favour above their deserts, to be talking and writing their stuff, to give trouble to the government which has showed them that favour; and very modest for a canting, hypocritical knave to be crying that the kingdom of Christ is not of this world at the same time that he, as Christ’s ambassador, receives 6,000l. or 7,000l. a year. But he is just the same thing in the Church that he is in the government, and as ready to receive the best pay for preaching the Bible, though he does not believe a word of it, as he is to take favour from the Crown, though, by his republican spirit and doctrine, he would be glad to abolish its power.”’

There is something melancholily suggestive in thus hearing the temporal head of a Church accusing of rank infidelity a man whom he had raised to be an overseer and bishop of souls in that very Church. If George knew that Hoadly did not believe in Scripture, he was infinitely worse than the prelate for the simple fact of his having made him a prelate, or having translated him from one diocese to another of more importance and more value. But, to resume:—

‘During the whole time the King was speaking, the Queen, by smiling and nodding in proper places, endeavoured all she could, but in vain, to make her court, by seeming to approve everything he said.’ Lord Hervey then attempted to give a pleasant turn to the conversation by remarking on prelates who were more docile towards government than Hoadly, and who, for being dull branches of episcopacy, and ignorant piecers of orthodoxy, were none the less good and quiet subjects. From the persons of the Church the vice-chamberlain got to the fabric, and then descanted to the Queen upon the newly restored bronze gates in Henry VII.’s Chapel. This excited the King’s ire anew. ‘My lord,’ said he, ‘you are always putting some of these fine things in the Queen’s head, and then I am to be plagued with a thousand plans and workmen.’ He grew sarcastic, too, on the Queen’s grotto in Richmond Gardens, which was known as Merlin’s Cave, from a statue of the great enchanter therein; and in which there was a collection of books, over which Stephen Duck, thresher, poet, and parson, had been constituted librarian. The Craftsman paper had attacked this plaything of the Queen, and her husband was delighted at the annoyance caused to her by such an attack.

The poor Queen probably thought she had succeeded in cleverly changing the topic of conversation by referring to and expressing disapproval of the expensive habit of giving vails to the servants of the house at which a person has been visiting. She remarked that she had found it no inconsiderable expense during the past summer to visit her friends even in town. ‘That is your own fault,’ growled the King; ‘for my father, when he went to people’s houses in town, never was fool enough to give away his money.’ The Queen pleaded that she only gave what her chamberlain, Lord Grantham, informed her was usual; whereupon poor Lord Grantham came in for his full share of censure. The Queen, said her consort, ‘was always asking some fool or another what she was to do, and that none but a fool would ask another fool’s advice.’

The vice-chamberlain gently hinted that liberality would be expected from a Queen on such occasions as her visits at the houses of her subjects. ‘Then let her stay at home, as I do,’ said the King. ‘You do not see me running into every puppy’s house to see his new chairs and stools.’ And then, turning to the Queen, he added: ‘Nor is it for you to be running your nose everywhere, and to be trotting about the town, to every fellow that will give you some bread and butter, like an old girl who loves to go abroad, no matter where, or whether it be proper or no.’ The Queen coloured, and knotted a good deal faster during this speech than before; whilst the tears came into her eyes, but she said not one word.

Such is the description of Lord Hervey, and it shows Caroline in a favourable light. The vice-chamberlain struck in for her, by observing that her Majesty could not see private collections of pictures without going to the owners’ houses, and honouring them by her presence. ‘Supposing,’ said the King, ‘she had a curiosity to see a tavern, would it be fit for her to satisfy it? and yet the innkeeper would be very glad to see her.’ The vice-chamberlain did not fail to see that this was a most illogical remark, and he very well observed, in reply, that, ‘if the innkeepers were used to be well received by her Majesty in her palace, he should think that the Queen’s seeing them at their own houses would give no additional scandal.’ As George found himself foiled by this observation, he felt only the more displeasure, and he gave vent to the last by bursting forth into a torrent of German, which sounded like abuse, and during the outpouring of which ‘the Queen made not one word of reply, but knotted on till she tangled her thread, then snuffed the candles that stood on the table before her, and snuffed one of them out. Upon which the King, in English, began a new dissertation upon her Majesty, and took her awkwardness for his text.’22

Unmoved as Caroline appeared at this degrading scene, she felt it acutely; but she did not wish that others should be aware of her feelings under such a visitation. Lord Hervey was aware of this; and when, on the following morning, she remarked that he had looked at her the evening before as if he thought she had been going to cry, the courtier protested that he had neither done the one nor thought the other, but had expressly directed his eyes on another object, lest if they met hers, the comicality of the scene should have set both of them laughing.

And such scenes were of constant occurrence. The King extracted something unpleasant from his very pleasures, just as acids may be produced from sugar. Sometimes he fell into a difficulty during the process. Thus, on one occasion, when the party were again assembled for their usual delightful evening, the Queen had mentioned the name of a person whose father, she said, was known to the King. It was at the time when his Majesty was most bitterly incensed against his eldest son. Caroline was on better terms with Frederick; but, as she remarked, they each knew the other too well to love or trust one another. Well, the King hearing father and son alluded to, observed, that ‘one very often sees fathers and sons very little alike; a wise father has very often a fool for his son. One sees a father a very brave man, and his son a scoundrel; a father very honest, and his son a great knave; a father a man of truth, and his son a great liar; in short, a father that has all sorts of good qualities, and a son who is good for nothing.’23 The Queen and all present betrayed, by their countenances, that they comprehended the historical parallel; whereupon the King attempted, as he thought, to make it less flagrantly applicable, by running the comparison in another sense. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘the case was just the reverse, and that very disagreeable fathers had very agreeable men for their sons.’ In this case, the King, as Lord Hervey suggests, was thinking of his own father, as in the former one he had been thinking of his son.

But how he drew what was sour from the sweetest of his pleasures is shown from his remarks after having been to the theatre to see Shakspeare’s ‘Henry IV.’ He was tolerably well pleased with all the actors, save the ‘Prince of Wales.’ He had never seen, he said, so awkward a fellow and so mean a looking scoundrel in his life. Everybody, says Lord Hervey, who hated the actual Prince of Wales thought of him as the King here expressed himself of the player; ‘but all very properly pretended to understand his Majesty literally, joined in the censure, and abused the theatrical Prince of Wales for a quarter of an hour together.’

It may be here noticed that Shakspeare owed some of his reputation, at this time, to the dissensions which existed between the King and his son. Had it, at least, not been for this circumstance, it is not likely that the play of ‘Henry IV.’ would have been so often represented as it was at the three theatres—Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields, Covent Garden, and Drury Lane. Every auditor knew how to make special application of the complainings and sorrowings of a royal sire over a somewhat profligate son; or of the unfilial speeches and hypocritical assurance of a princely heir, flung at his Sovereign and impatient sire. The house in Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields had the reputation of being the Tory house; and the Prince of Wales there was probably represented as a proper gentleman; not out of love to him, but rather out of contempt to the father. It was not a house which received the favour of either Caroline or her consort. The new pieces there ran too strongly against the despotic rule of kings—the only sort of rule for which George at all cared, and the lack of which made him constantly abusive of England, her institutions, parliament, and public men. It is difficult to say what the real opinion of Caroline was upon this matter, for at divers times we find her uttering opposite sentiments. She could be as abusive against free institutions and civil and religious rights as ever her husband was. She has been heard to declare that sovereignty was worth little where it was merely nominal, and that to be king or queen in a country where people governed through their parliament was to wear a crown and to exercise none of the prerogatives which are ordinarily attached to it. At other times she would declare that the real glory of England was the result of her free institutions; the people were industrious and enterprising because they were free, and knew that their property was secure from any attack on the part of prince or government. They consequently regarded their sovereign with more affection than a despotic monarch could be regarded by a slavish people; and she added, that she would not have cared to share a throne in England, if the people by whom it was surrounded had been slaves without a will of their own, or without a heart that throbbed at the name of liberty. The King never had but one opinion on the subject, and therefore the theatre at Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields was for ever resounding with clap-traps against despotism, and that in presence of an audience of whom Frederick, Prince of Wales, was chief, and Bolingbroke led the applause.

But even Drury Lane could be as democratic as Lincoln’s Inn. Thus, in the very year of which we are treating, Lillo brought out his ‘Christian Hero’ at Drury Lane, and the audience had as little difficulty to apply the parts to living potentates as they had reluctance to applaud to the echo passages like the following against despotic rulers:—

But ‘Drury’ did not often offend in this guise, and even George and Caroline might have gone to see ‘Junius Brutus,’ and have been amused. The Queen, who well knew the corruption of the senate, might have smiled as Mills, in Brutus, with gravity declared that the senators—

and George might have silently assented to the reply of Cibber, Jun., in ‘Messala,’ that—

The Queen’s vice-chamberlain asserts that the King’s heart still beat for Caroline as warmly as his temper did against her. This assertion is not proved, but the contrary, by the facts. These facts were of so painful a nature to the Queen that she did not like to speak of them, even to Sir Robert Walpole. One of them is a precious instance of the conjugal warmth of heart pledged for by Lord Hervey.

The night before the King had last left Hanover for England he supped gaily, in company with Madame Walmoden and her friends, who were not so nice as to think that the woman who had deserted her husband for a King who betrayed his consort had at all lost caste by such conduct. Towards the close of the banquet, the frail lady, all wreathed in mingled tears and smiles, rose, and gave as a toast, or sentiment, the ‘next 29th of May.’ On that day the old libertine had promised to be again at the feet of his new concubine; and as this was known to the select and delicate company, they drank the ‘toast’ amid shouts of loyalty and congratulations.

The knowledge of this fact gave more pain to Caroline than all the royal fits of ill-humour together. The pain was increased by the King’s conduct at home. It had been his custom of a morning, at St. James’s, to tarry in the Queen’s rooms until after he had, from behind the blinds, seen the guard relieved in the court-yard below: this took place about eleven o’clock. This year he ceased to visit the Queen or to watch the soldiers; but by nine o’clock in the morning he was seated at his desk, writing lengthy epistles to Madame Walmoden, in reply to the equally long letters from the lady, who received and despatched a missive every post.

‘He wants to go to Hanover, does he?’ asked Sir Robert Walpole of Lord Hervey; ‘and to be there by the 29th of May. Well, he shan’t go for all that.’

Domestic griefs could not depress the Queen’s wit. An illustration of this is afforded by her remark on the Triple Alliance. ‘It always put her in mind,’ she said, ‘of the South Sea scheme, which the parties concerned entered into, not without knowing the cheat, but hoping to make advantage of it, everybody designing, when he had made his own fortune, to be the first in scrambling out of it, and each thinking himself wise enough to be able to leave his fellow-adventurers in the lurch.’

It has been well observed that the King’s good humour was now as insulting to her Majesty as his bad. When he was in the former rare vein, he exhibited it by entertaining the Queen with accounts of her rival, and the many pleasures which he and that lady had enjoyed together. He appears at Hanover to have been as extravagant in the entertainments which he gave as his grandfather, Ernest Augustus. Some of these court revels he caused to be painted on canvas; the ladies represented therein were all portraits of the actual revellers. Several of such pictures were brought over to England, and five of them were hung up in the Queen’s dressing-room. Occasionally, of an evening, the King would take a candle from the Queen’s table, and go from picture to picture, with Lord Hervey, telling him its history, explaining the joyous incidents, naming the persons represented, and detailing all that had been said or done on the particular occasion before them. ‘During which lecture,’ says the vice-chamberlain himself, ‘Lord Hervey, while peeping over his Majesty’s shoulders at those pictures, was shrugging up his own, and now and then stealing a look, to make faces at the Queen, who, a little angry, a little peevish, and a little tired at her husband’s absurdity, and a little entertained with his lordship’s grimaces, used to sit and knot in a corner of the room, sometimes yawning, and sometimes smiling, and equally afraid of betraying those signs, either of her lassitude or mirth.’

In the course of the year which we have now reached, Queen Caroline communicated to Lord Hervey a fact, which is not so much evidence of her Majesty’s common-sense, as of the presumption and immorality of those who gave Caroline little credit for having even the sense which is so qualified. Lord Bolingbroke had married the Marchioness de Villette, niece of Madame de Maintenon, about the year 1716. The union, however, was not only kept secret for many years, but when Bolingbroke was under attainder, and a sum of 52,000l. belonging to his wife was in the hands of Decker, the banker, Lady Bolingbroke swore that she was not married to him, and so obtained possession of a sum which, being hers, was her husband’s, and which being her husband’s, who was attainted as a traitor, was forfeit to the Crown. However, as some of it went through the hands of poor Sophia Dorothea’s rival, the easy Duchess of Kendal, and her rapacious niece, Lady Walsingham, the matter was not enquired into. Subsequently Lady Bolingbroke attempted to excuse her husband’s alleged dealings with the Pretender, by asserting that he entered into them solely for the purpose of serving the Court of London. ‘That was, in short,’ said Caroline to Lord Hervey, ‘to betray the Pretender; for though Madame de Villette softened the word, she did not soften the thing, which I own,’ continued the Queen, ‘was a speech which had so much impudence and villainy mixed up in it, that I could never bear him or her from that hour, and could hardly hinder myself from saying to her—“And pray, madam, what security can the King have that my Lord Bolingbroke does not desire to come here with the same honest desire that he went to Rome? or that he swears that he is no longer a Jacobite, with any more truth than you have sworn you are not his wife?”’ The only wonder is, considering Caroline’s vivacious character, that she restrained herself from giving expression to her thoughts. She was eminently fond of ‘speaking daggers’ to those who merited such a gladiatorial visitation.