The last nine years of the reign of the consort of Caroline were of a very varied character. The earliest of his acts after the death of Frederick was one of which Caroline would certainly not have approved. In case of his demise before the next heir to the throne should be of age, he, with consent of parliament, named the widow of Frederick as regent of the kingdom. This appointment gave great umbrage to the favourite son of Caroline, William, Duke of Cumberland, and it was one to which Caroline herself would never have consented.

But George now cared little for what the opinions of Caroline might have been; and the remainder of his days was spent amid death, gaiety, and politics. The year in which Frederick died was marked by the decease of the husband of Caroline’s eldest daughter, of whose plainness, wooing, and marriage I have previously spoken. The Prince of Orange died on the 11th of October 1751. He had not improved in beauty since his marriage, but, increasingly ugly as he became, his wife became also increasingly jealous of him. Importunate, however, as the jealousy was, it had the merit of being founded on honest and healthy affection.

The immediate cause of the prince’s death was an imposthume in the head. Although his health had been indifferent, his death was rather sudden and unexpected. Lord Holdernesse was sent over from England by the King, Walpole says, ‘to learn rather than to teach,’ but certainly with letters of condolence to Caroline’s widowed daughter. She is said to have received the paternal sympathy and advice in the most haughty and insulting manner. She was proud, perhaps, of being made the gouvernante of her son; and she probably remembered the peremptory rejection by her father of the interested sympathy she herself had offered him on the decease of her mother, to whose credit she had hoped to succeed at St. James’s.

But George himself had little sympathy to spare, and felt no immoderate grief for the death of either son or son-in-law. On the 6th of November 1751, within a month of the prince’s death, and not very many after that of his son and heir to the throne, George was at Drury Lane Theatre. The entertainment, played for his especial pleasure, consisted of Farquhar’s ‘Beaux Stratagem’ and Fielding’s ‘Intriguing Chambermaid.’ In the former, the King was exceedingly fond of the ‘Foigard’ of Yates and the ‘Cherry’ of Miss Minors. In the latter piece, Mrs. Clive played her original part of ‘Lettice,’ a part in which she had then delighted the town—a town which could be delighted with such parts—for now seventeen years. Walpole thus relates an incident of the night. He is writing to Sir Horace Mann, from Arlington Street, under the date of the 22nd of November 1751: ‘A certain King, that, whatever airs you may give yourself, you are not at all like, was last week at the play. The intriguing chambermaid in the farce says to the old gentleman, ‘You are villainously old; you are sixty-six; you can’t have the impudence to think of living above two years.’ The old gentleman in the stage-box turned about in a passion, and said, “This is d—d stuff!”’

George was right in his criticism, but rather coarse than king-like in expressing it. Walpole too, it may be noticed, misquotes what his friend Mrs. Clive said in her character of Lettice, and he misquotes evidently for the purpose of making the story more pointed against the King, who was as sensitive upon the point of age as Louis XIV. himself. Lettice does not say to Oldcastle ‘you are villainously old.’ She merely states the three obstacles to Oldcastle marrying her young mistress. ‘In the first place your great age; you are at least some sixty-six. Then there is, in the second place, your terrible ungenteel air; and thirdly, that horrible face of yours, which it is impossible for any one to see without being frightened.’ She does, however, add a phrase which must have sounded harshly on the ear of a sensitive and sexagenarian King; though not more so than on that of any other auditor of the same age. ‘I think you could not have the conscience to live above a year or a year and a half at most.’ The royal criticism, then, was correct, however roughly expressed.

In the same year, 1751, died another of the children of George and Caroline—Louisa, Queen of Denmark. She had only reached her twenty-seventh year, and had been eight years married. Her mother loved her, and the nation admired her for her grace, amiability, and talents. Her career, in many respects, resembled that of her mother. She was married to a king who kept a mistress in order that the world should think he was independent of all influence on the part of his wife. She was basely treated by this king; but not a word of complaint against him entered into the letters which this spirited and sensible woman addressed to her relations. Indeed, she had said at the time of her marriage that, if she should become unhappy, her family should never know anything about it. She died, in the flower of her age, a terrible death, as Walpole calls it, and after an operation which lasted an hour. The cause of it was the neglect of a slight rupture, occasioned by stooping suddenly when enceinte, the injury resulting from which she imprudently and foolishly concealed. This is all the more strange, as her mother, on her death-bed, said to her: ‘Louisa, remember I die by being giddy and obstinate, in having kept my disorder a secret.’ Her farewell letter to her father and family, a most touching address, and the similitude of her fate to that of her mother, sensibly affected the almost dried-up heart of the King. ‘This has been a fatal year to my family,’ groaned the son of Sophia Dorothea. ‘I lost my eldest son, but I was glad of it. Then the Prince of Orange died, and left everything in confusion. Poor little Edward has been cut open for an imposthume in his side; and now the Queen of Denmark is gone! I know I did not love my children when they were young; I hated to have them coming into the room; but now I love them as well as most fathers.’

The Countess of Suffolk (the servant of Caroline and the mistress of Caroline’s husband) was among the few persons whom the eloquence and fervour of Whitfield failed to touch. When this latter was chaplain to Lady Huntingdon, and in the habit of preaching in the drawing-room of that excellent and exemplary woman, there was an eager desire to be among the privileged to be admitted to hear him. This privilege was solicited of Lady Huntingdon by Lady Rockingham, for the King’s ex-favourite, Lady Suffolk. The patroness of Whitfield thought of Magdalen repentant, and expressed her readiness to welcome her, an additional sheep to an increasing flock. The beauty came, and Whitfield preached neither more nor less earnestly, unconscious of her presence. So searching, however, was his sermon, and so readily could the enraged fair one apply its terrible truths to herself, that it was only with difficulty she could sit it out with apparent calm. Inwardly, she felt that she had been the especial object at which her assailant had flung his sharpest arrows. Accordingly, when Whitfield had retired, the exquisite fury, chafed but not repentant, turned upon the meditative Lady Huntingdon, and well nigh annihilated her with the torrent and power of her invective. Her sister-in-law, Lady Betty Germain, implored her to be silent; but only the more unreservedly did she empty the vials of her wrath upon the saintly lady of the house, who was lost in astonishment, anger, and confusion. Old Lady Bertie and the Dowager Duchess of Ancaster rose to her rescue; and, by right of their relationship with the lady whom the King delighted to honour, required her to be silent or civil. It was all in vain: the irritated fair one maintained that she had been brought there to be pilloried by the preacher; and she finally swept out of the room, leaving behind her an assembly in various attitudes of wonder and alarm; some fairly deafened by the thundering echoes of her expressed wrath, others at a loss to decide whether Lady Huntingdon had or had not directed the arrows of the preacher, and all most charmingly unconscious that, be that as it might, the lady was only smarting because she had rubbed against a sermon bristling with the most stinging truths.

Whitfield made note of those of the royal household who repaired to the services over which he presided in Lady Huntingdon’s house. In 1752, when he saw regularly attending among his congregation one of Queen Caroline’s ex-ladies, Mrs. Grinfield, he writes thereupon: ‘One of Cæsar’s household hath been lately awakened by her ladyship’s instrumentality, and I hope others will meet with the like blessing.’

In 1755 England and France were at issue touching their possessions in Canada. The dispute resulted in a war; and the war brought with it the temporary loss of the Electorate of Hanover to England, and much additional disgrace; which last was not wiped out till the great Pitt was at the helm, and by his spirited administration helped England to triumph in every quarter of the globe. Amid misfortune or victory, however, the King, as outwardly ‘impassible’ as ever, took also less active share in public events than he did of old; and he lived with the regularity of a man who has a regard for his health. Every night, at nine o’clock, he sat down to cards. The party generally consisted of his two daughters, the Princesses Amelia and Caroline, two or three of the late Queen’s ladies, and as many of the gentlemen of the household—whose presence there was a proof of the Sovereign’s personal esteem for them. Had none other been present, the party would have been one on which remark would not be called for. But at the same table with the children of good Queen Caroline was seated their father’s mistress, the naturalised German Baroness Walmoden—Countess of Yarmouth. George II. had no idea that the presence of such a woman was an outrage committed upon his own children. Every Saturday, in summer, he carried those ladies, but without his daughters, to Richmond. They went in coaches-and-six, in the middle of the day, with the heavy horse-guards kicking up the dust before them—dined, walked an hour in the garden, returned in the same dusty parade; and his Majesty fancied himself the most gallant and lively prince in Europe.44

He had leisure, however, to think of the establishment of the sons of Frederick; and in 1756 George II. sent a message to his grandson, now Prince of Wales, whereby he offered him 40,000l. a-year and apartments at Kensington and St. James’s. The prince accepted the allowance, but declined the residence, on the ground that separation from his mother would be painful to her. When this plea was made, the prince, as Dodington remarks in his diary, did not live with his mother, either in town or country. The prince’s brother Edward, afterwards created Duke of York, was furnished with a modest revenue of 5,000l. a-year. The young prince is said to have been not insensible to the attractions of Lady Essex, daughter of Sir Charles Williams. ‘The prince,’ says Walpole, ‘has got his liberty, and seems extremely disposed to use it, and has great life and good humour. She has already made a ball for him. Sir Richard Lyttelton was so wise as to make her a visit, and advise her not to meddle with politics; that the Princess (Dowager of Wales) would conclude that it was a plan laid for bringing together Prince Edward and Mr. Fox. As Mr. Fox was not just the person my Lady Essex was thinking of bringing together with Prince Edward, she replied, very cleverly, “And, my dear Sir Richard, let me advise you not to meddle with politics neither.”’

From the attempt to establish the Prince of Wales under his own superintendence, the King was called to mourn over the death of another child.

The truth-loving Caroline Elizabeth was unreservedly beloved by her parents, was worthy of the affection, and repaid it by an ardent attachment. She was fair, good, accomplished, and unhappy. The cause of her unhappiness may be perhaps more than guessed at in the circumstance of her retiring from the world on the death of Lord Hervey. The sentiment with which he had, for the sake of vanity or ambition, inspired her was developed into a sort of motherly love for his children, for whom she exhibited great and constant regard. Therewith she was conscious of but one strong desire—a desire to die. For many years previous to her decease she lived in her father’s palace, literally ‘cloistered up,’ inaccessible to nearly all, yet with active sympathy for the poor and suffering classes in the metropolis.

Walpole, speaking of the death of the Princess Caroline, the third daughter of George II., says: ‘Though her state of health had been so dangerous for years, and her absolute confinement for many of them, her disorder was, in a manner, new and sudden, and her death unexpected by herself, though earnestly her wish. Her goodness was constant and uniform, her generosity immense, her charities most extensive; in short, I, no royalist, could be lavish in her praise. What will divert you is that the Duke of Norfolk’s and Lord Northumberland’s upper servants have asked leave to put themselves in mourning, not out of regard for this admirable princess, but to be more sur le bon ton. I told the duchess I supposed they would expect her to mourn hereafter for their relations.’

The princess died in December 1757, and early in the following year the King was seized with a serious fit of illness, which terminated in a severe attack of gout, ‘which had never been at court above twice in his reign,’ says Walpole, and the appearance of which was considered as giving the royal sufferer a chance of five or six years more of life. But it was not to be so; for the old royal lion in the Tower had just expired, and people who could ‘put that and that together’ could not but pronounce oraculary that the royal man would follow the royal brute. ‘Nay,’ says Lord Chesterfield to his son, ‘this extravagancy was believed by many above people.’ The fine gentleman means that it was believed by many of his own class.

It was not the old King, however, who was first to be summoned from the royal circle by the Inevitable Angel. A young princess passed away before the more aged Sovereign. Walpole has a word or two to say upon the death of the Princess Elizabeth, the second daughter of Frederick, Prince of Wales, who died in the September of this year. The immediate cause of death was an inflammation, which carried her off in two days. ‘Her figure,’ he says, ‘was so very unfortunate that it would have been difficult for her to be happy; but her parts and application were extraordinary. I saw her act in “Cato” at eight years old (when she could not stand alone, but was forced to lean against the side-scene), better than any of her brothers and sisters. She had been so unhealthy that, at that age, she had not been taught to read, but had learned the part of Lucia by hearing the others study their parts. She went to her father and mother, and begged she might act. They put her off as gently as they could; she desired leave to repeat her part, and when she did, it was with so much sense, that there was no denying her.’

Before George’s hour had yet come, another child was to precede the aged father to the tomb. In 1759 Anne, the eldest and least loved of the daughters of Caroline, died in Holland. At the period of her birth, the 9th of October 1709, her godmother, Queen Anne, was occupying the throne of England; her grandfather, George, was Elector of Hanover; Sophia Dorothea was languishing in the castle of Ahlden, and her father and mother bore the title of Electoral Prince and Princess. She was born at Hanover; and was five years old when, with her sister, Amelia Sophia, who was two years younger, her mother, the Princess Caroline, afterwards Queen, arrived in this country on the 15th of October 1714. She early exhibited a haughty and imperious disposition; possessed very little feeling for, and exercised very little gentleness towards, those who even rendered her a willing service. Queen Caroline sharply corrected this last defect. She discovered that the princess was accustomed to make one of her ladies-in-waiting stand by her bedside every night, and read aloud to her till she fell asleep. On one occasion the princess kept her lady standing so long, that she at last fainted from sheer fatigue. On the following night, when Queen Caroline had retired to rest, she sent for her offending daughter, and requested her to read aloud to her for a while. The princess was about to take a chair, but the Queen said she could hear her better if she read standing. Anne obeyed, and read till fatigue made her pause. ‘Go on,’ said the Queen; ‘it entertains me.’ Anne went on, sulkily and wearily; till, increasingly weary, she once more paused for rest and looked round for a seat. ‘Continue, continue,’ said the Queen, ‘I am not yet tired of listening.’ Anne burst into tears with vexation, and confessed that she was tired both of standing and reading, and was ready to sink with fatigue. ‘If you feel so faint from one evening of such employment, what must your attendants feel, upon whom you force the same discipline night after night? Be less selfish, my child, in future, and do not indulge in luxuries purchased at the cost of weariness and ill-health to others.’ Anne did not profit by the lesson; and few people were warmly attached to the proud and egotistical lady.

The princess spent nearly twenty years in England, and a little more than a quarter of a century in Holland; the last seven years of that period she was a widow. Her last thoughts were for the aggrandisement of her family; and, when she was battling with death, she rallied her strength in order to sign the contract of marriage between her daughter and the Prince Nassau Walberg, and to write a letter to the States General, requesting them to sanction the match. Having accomplished this, the eldest daughter of Caroline laid down the pen, and calmly awaited the death which was not long in coming.

It remains for us now only to speak of the demise of the husband of Caroline. On the night of Friday, the 25th of October 1760, the King retired to rest at an early hour, and well in health. At six (next morning) he drank his usual cup of chocolate, walked to the window, looked out upon Kensington Gardens, and made some observation upon the direction of the wind, which had lately delayed the mails from Holland, and which kept from him intelligence which he was anxious to receive, and which he was saved the pain of hearing. George had said to the page-in-waiting that he would take a turn in the garden; and he was on his way thither, at seven o’clock, when the attendant heard the sound of a fall. He entered the room through which the King was passing on his way to the garden, and he found George II. lying on the ground, with a wound on the right side of his face, caused by striking it in his fall against the side of a bureau. He could only say, ‘Send for Amelia,’ and then, gasping for breath, died. Whilst the sick, almost deaf, and purblind daughter of the King was sent for, the message being that her father wished to speak to her, the servants carried the body to the bed from which the King had so lately risen. They had not time to close the eyes, when the princess entered the room. Before they could inform her of the unexpected catastrophe, she had advanced to the bedside: she stooped over him, fancying that he was speaking to her, and that she could not hear his words. The poor lady was sensibly shocked; but she did not lose her presence of mind. She despatched messengers for surgeons and wrote to the Prince of Wales. The medical men were speedily in attendance; but he was beyond mortal help, and they could only conclude that the King had died of the rupture of some vessel of the heart, as he had for years been subject to palpitation of that organ. Dr. Beilby Porteous, in his panegyrising epitaph on the monarch, considers his death as having been appropriate and necessary. He had accomplished all for which he had been commissioned by Heaven, and had received all the rewards in return which Heaven could give to man on earth:—

George II. died possessed of considerable personal property. Of this he bequeathed 50,000l. between the Duke of Cumberland and the Princesses Amelia and Mary. The share received by his daughters did not equal what he left to his last ‘favourite’—Lady Yarmouth. The legacy to that German lady, of whom he used to write to Queen Caroline from Hanover, ‘You must love the Walmoden, for she loves me,’ consisted of a cabinet and ‘contents,’ valued, it is said, at 11,000l. His son, the Duke of Cumberland, further received from him a bequest of 130,000l., placed on mortgages not immediately recoverable. The testator had originally bequeathed twice that amount to his son; but he revoked half, on the ground of the expenses of the war. He describes him as the best son that ever lived, and declares that he had never given him cause to be offended: ‘A pretty strong comment,’ as Horace Walpole remarks, when detailing the incidents of the King’s decease, ‘on the affair of Klosterseven.’ The King’s jewels were worth, according to Lady Suffolk, 150,000l.: of the best of them, which he kept in Hanover, he made crown jewels; the remainder, with some cabinets, were left to the duke. ‘Two days before the King died,’ says Walpole, ‘it happened oddly to my Lady Suffolk. She went to make a visit at Kensington, not knowing of the review. She found herself hemmed in by coaches, and was close to him whom she had not seen for so many years, and to my Lady Yarmouth; but they did not know her. It struck her, and has made her sensible to his death.’

Intelligence of the King’s decease was sent, as before said, to the Prince of Wales, by the Princess Amelia. The heir-apparent, however, received earlier intimation of the fact through a German valet-de-chambre, at Kensington. The latter despatched a note, which bore a private mark previously agreed upon, and which reached the heir to so much greatness as he was out riding. He knew what had happened by the sign. ‘Without surprise or emotion, without dropping a word that indicated what had happened, he said his horse was lame, and turned back to Kew. At dismounting he said to the groom: “I have said this horse was lame; I forbid you to say to the contrary.”’ If this story of Walpole’s be true, the longest reign in England started from a lie.

In the meantime there was the old King to bury, and he was consigned to the tomb with a ceremony which has been graphically pictured by Horace Walpole. He describes himself as attending the funeral, not as a mourner, but as ‘a rag of quality,’ in which character he walked, as affording him the best means of seeing the show. He pronounced it a noble sight, and he appears to have enjoyed it extremely. ‘The Prince’s chamber, hung with purple, and a quantity of silver lamps, the coffin under a canopy of purple velvet, and six vast chandeliers of silver, on high stands, had a very good effect. The procession, through a line of foot-guards, every seventh man bearing a torch—the horse-guards lining the outsides—their officers, with drawn sabres and crape sashes, on horseback—the drums muffled—the fifes—bells tolling—and minute guns—all this was very solemn.’ There was, however, something more exquisite still in the estimation of this very unsentimental rag of quality. ‘The charm,’ he says, ‘the charm was the entrance to the Abbey, where we were received by the dean and chapter in rich robes, the choir and almoners bearing torches; the whole Abbey so illuminated that one saw it to greater advantage than by day; the tombs, long aisles, and fretted roof all appearing distinctly, and with the happiest chiaro oscuro. There wanted nothing but incense and little chapels here and there, with priests saying mass for the repose of the defunct; yet one could not complain of its not being Catholic enough. I had been in dread of being coupled with some boy of ten years old; but the heralds were not very accurate, and I walked with George Grenville, taller and older, to keep me in countenance. When we came to the chapel of Henry VII. all solemnity and decorum ceased; no order was observed, people sat or stood where they could or would; the yeomen of the guard were crying out for help, oppressed by the immense weight of the coffin; the bishop read sadly, and blundered in the prayers. The fine chapter, Man that is born of a woman, was chanted, not read; and the anthem, besides being immeasurably tedious, would have served as well for a nuptial. The real serious part was the figure of the Duke of Cumberland, heightened by a thousand melancholy circumstances. He had a dark-brown adonis, with a cloak of black cloth, and a train of five yards. Attending the funeral of a father could not be pleasant; his leg extremely bad, yet forced to stand upon it near two hours; his face bloated and disturbed with his late paralytic stroke, which has affected, too, one of his eyes; and placed over the mouth of the vault, into which, in all probability, he must himself soon descend; think how unpleasant a situation. He bore it all with a firm and unaffected countenance. This grave scene was fully contrasted by the burlesque Duke of Newcastle. He fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, and flung himself back into a stall, the archbishop hovering over him with a smelling-bottle; but in two minutes his curiosity got the better of his hypocrisy, and he ran about the chapel with his glass, to spy who was or who was not there, spying with one hand and mopping his eyes with the other. Then returned the fear of catching cold; and the Duke of Cumberland, who was sinking with heat, felt himself weighed down, and turning round, found it was the Duke of Newcastle standing upon his train to avoid the chill of the marble. It was very theatrical to look down into the vault, where the coffin lay attended by mourners with lights. Clavering, the groom of the chamber, refused to sit up with the body, and was dismissed by the King’s order.’

Speaking of the last year of the life of George II., Walpole remarks, with a truth that cannot be gainsaid: ‘It was glorious and triumphant beyond example; and his death was most felicitous to himself, being without a pang, without tasting a reverse, and when his sight and hearing were so nearly extinguished that any prolongation could but have swelled to calamities.’