FOOTNOTES:
[40] Commander-in-Chief, husband of Mary Bellenden, who had died the previous autumn.
[41] He was well aware the Prince was hard pressed for money, and he was away from England eight months.
[42] This was denied afterwards, but it was probably the Household of George the Second when Prince of Wales.
CHAPTER XVII.
A New Favourite and a Settlement.
The King and Queen in the jubilation of their victory over the Prince of Wales had a mind to celebrate it by turning him and his young wife out of St. James’s Palace, but they were dissuaded from this benevolent intention by the judicious Sir Robert Walpole. Instead the Prince retained his position—though no doubt he would have much preferred a house of his own—but the state of affairs under these circumstances must have reached the limit of painfulness to the young Princess and her husband.
Each night “he led the Queen by the hand to dinner,” says Doran, “and she could have stabbed him on the way; for her wrath was more bitter than ever against him, for the reason that he had introduced her name, through his friends, in the Parliamentary debate.”
This referred presumably to his mention of the fact that he had told his mother of his embarrassments.
The Prince still attended his father’s levees occasionally, but the King never acknowledged his presence in any way whatever. Very soon, however, at the conclusion of the session of Parliament, the Court moved to Richmond, and there the little King, now quite restored to health, distinguished this year 1737 by another gracious act; he took still another mistress. This time the object of his Royal selection was the children’s governess, Lady Deloraine.
The lady in question was Mary Howard—the King seemed to favour the name of Howard in his amours—of the Suffolk family, who had married Henry Scott, first Earl of Deloraine; but at this period he was dead and she had remarried William Wyndham, Esq., of Cassham.
She was an extremely pretty woman, but celebrated for the looseness of her talk in that age of looseness. She was not a woman of much brain power, and a fair estimate of her character may be formed from the following incident.
Sir Robert Walpole came across her one day in the Hall at Richmond while she was dangling her little boy of about twelve months in her arms, and made the following characteristic remark—“That’s a very pretty boy, Lady Deloraine, whose is it?” Her ladyship, nothing abashed, took the enquiry in the spirit in which it was offered, and replied before a group of people—“Mr. Wyndham’s, upon honour;” and then laughingly continued, “but I will not promise whose the next shall be!”
Continuing the discourse later in private with Sir Robert Walpole, she pretended that she had not yet yielded to the King’s importunities, and remarked that “she was not of an age to act like a vain or a loving fool, but if she did consent she would be well paid.” She added naively to Sir Robert—who himself had a mistress, the well known Miss Skerrett, whom he adored and afterwards married—“nothing but interest should bribe her; for as to love she had enough of that, as well as a younger man at home; and that she thought old men and Kings ought always to be made to pay well!” Her empty head and want of morals led her to boast freely at this time; she confided in the well known Lady Sundon, with whom she had a very slight acquaintance, that the King had been very importunate these two years, and had often told her how unkind she was to refuse him, that it was mere crossness, for that he was sure her husband (Mr. Wyndham, who was sub-governor to the Duke of Cumberland) would not take it at all ill.
She made a similar communication to Lord Hervey, abruptly one day at Richmond, at this time before a room full of people: “Do you know the King has been in love with me these two years?” she queried.
At which Lord Hervey, rather taken aback, answered, to turn the conversation, “Who is not in love with you?”
He himself certainly was not, for this is how he sums her up in his Memoirs:
“Her Ladyship was one of the vainest as well as one of the simplest women that ever lived; but to this wretched head there was certainly joined one of the prettiest faces that ever was formed, which, though she was now five and thirty,[43] had a bloom upon it too, that not one woman in ten thousand has at fifteen.” This was Horace Walpole’s opinion of Lady Deloraine: “A pretty idiot, with most of the vices of her own sex, and the additional one of ours—drinking.
“Yet this thing of convenience on the arrival of Lady Yarmouth, Madame Walmoden, put on all that dignity of passion, which even revolts real inclination.”
Lady Deloraine, however, went on her way rejoicing at this time, and as the summer wore on and the King showed no signs of returning to Hanover and Madame de Walmoden, openly boasted that she was keeping him in England.
She did not, however, appear to derive much substantial profit from her position, as the following incident, related by Sir Robert Walpole to the Queen, will show; neither had the King forgotten Madame de Walmoden.
George had ordered Walpole one day to buy one hundred lottery tickets, and to charge the amount, £1,000, to the Secret Service Fund, an atrocious robbery of the public!
Walpole, having carried out his commission without a murmur, confided the transaction to Lord Hervey, mentioning that it was for the King’s favourite.
Hervey, thinking he meant Lady Deloraine, commented: “I did not think he went so deep there,” referring to the amount.
“No,” Walpole corrected, “I mean the Hanover woman. You are right to imagine that he does not go so deep to his lying fool here. He will give her a couple of the tickets and think her generously used.”
By which it seems that the King’s German women had by far the better knack of getting money out of him than the English favourites.
But Walpole’s sagacity had, just previous to this, at the end of the Parliamentary Session, brought the question of the Prince of Wales’s income adroitly into something of a settlement. He had with the greatest difficulty induced the King and Queen to agree to a settlement of the £50,000 a year mentioned in the King’s celebrated message to the Prince, and the difficulty of the other £50,000 a year claimed by Frederick was got over by Parliament being persuaded to settle an extra large jointure on the Princess of Wales, £50,000 a year in fact. So the parsimonious little King got out of paying it after all.