A forgotten Prince of Wales

by Henry Curties

FOOTNOTES:

[59] Opinions of the Duchess of Marlborough, 1737-8.

[60] Sylvia was the well-known name by which he designated his wife in verse. Vide Walpole’s “Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second.” Vol. I., p. 434.

[61] The Princess.

[62] Allen, Lord Bathurst.

[63] Respecting the Convention with Spain.

[64] A distinguished officer: he had been many years a Lord of the Admiralty, was now Admiral of the Fleet, and was appointed in the summer to the command of the Channel Fleet.

[65] The Azogne (quicksilver) ships, which plied annually between Vera Cruz and Cadiz, and the interception of which had been an early object of the British Government, but having heard of the hostilities, they left their usual track, made for the coast of Ireland, and thence ran down the coast of France, and got safe into Santander.

CHAPTER XXIV.
The Reconciliation.

In 1741 the antagonism between the Prince and his father had not subsided and party spirit was strong, the followers of the King, such as Hervey and others, did not scruple, as they had never scrupled, to malign the Prince. There were, in theory, two Courts, the King’s and the Prince’s, the followers of both using the term “going to Court” in speaking of their visits to their respective masters. Walpole tells a story which bears upon the point.

“Somebody who belonged to the Prince of Wales said he was going to Court. It was objected, that he ought to say ‘going to Carlton House’: that the only Court is where the King resides. Lady Pomfret, with her paltry air of learning and absurdity, said: ‘Oh, Lord! is there no Court in England but the King’s? sure there are many more! There is the Court of Chancery, the Court of Exchequer, the Court of King’s Bench, etc.’ ‘Don’t you love her? Lord Lincoln does her daughter.’”

He refers to Lord Lincoln, one of the King’s party, and a nephew of the Duke of Newcastle, one of the Ministers.

“Not only his uncle-duke,” continues Horace Walpole, speaking of Lord Lincoln, “but even his Majesty is fallen in love with him. He talked to the King at his levée without being spoken to. That was always thought high treason, but I don’t know how the gruff gentleman liked it.”

The “gruff” gentleman was of course the King.

The faction fever between the King’s party and that of his son reached its height, however, in the year 1742, when the Prince’s party combined with other opponents of the Government and overthrew the great Sir Robert Walpole after his many years of office. So Queen Caroline’s trusted minister and adviser fell at last.

He was succeeded by Lord Wilmington, who practically carried on the same policy as his predecessor.

In this year died Lady Sundon, who had been Mistress of the Robes to Queen Caroline and one of her confidantes.

“Lord Sundon is in great grief,” writes Horace Walpole. “I am surprised, for she has had fits of madness ever since her ambition met such a check by the death of the Queen. She had great power with her, though the Queen affected to despise her, but had unluckily told her, or fallen into her power, by some secret. I was saying to Lady Pomfret ‘to be sure she is dead very rich,’ she replied with some warmth, ‘She never took money.’ When I came home I mentioned this to Sir Robert. ‘No,’ said he, ‘but she took jewels. Lord Pomfret’s place of Master of the Horse to the Queen was bought of her for a pair of diamond earrings, of fourteen hundred pounds value.’

“One day she wore them at a visit at old Marlboro’s; as soon as she was gone, the duchess said to Lady Mary Wortley, ‘How can that woman have the impudence to go about in that bribe?’

“‘Madam,’ said Lady Mary, ‘how would you have people know where wine is to be sold unless there is a sign hung out?’

“Sir Robert told me that in the enthusiasm of her vanity, Lady Sundon had proposed to him to unite with her and govern the kingdom together; he bowed, begged her patronage, but, he said, he thought nobody fit to govern the kingdom but the King and Queen.”

About the period of 1742 rumours of a fresh Stuart rebellion began to permeate the country, and it was probably this fact, together with the Prince of Wales’s popularity with the public, which decided the King to come to a reconciliation with him. There was, however, now no Sir Robert to apply his wonderful statesmanship in bringing about the matter with the finesse and forethought he always displayed in cases of this sort, though it must be admitted that his arts had always been directed against the Prince.

However, the matter was done, though clumsily. It was commenced by a gentle hint given to the Prince that a letter from him to his father would be acceptable.

This proposition does not appear to have met at first with the Prince’s favour, he, possibly, thinking that the King owed him some reparation, and that the first step should come from him. But he eventually put his feelings in his pocket and wrote his father the desired letter.

This letter reached the King late at night, and he lost no time in responding to it; he expressed his wish to receive the Prince on the following day.

Frederick repaired to St. James’s as desired, attended by five of his suite. He was received by his father in one of the drawing-rooms, and the interview must have been an exceedingly interesting one for the onlookers from its importance, but its duration was bound within the limits of the strictest formality.

“How does the Princess do? I hope she is well,” was the sole scrap of conversation which passed King George’s lips, if chroniclers of the time can be credited. The Prince kissed his father’s hand, answered the question concerning his wife’s health, and—withdrew.

There appears, however, to have been a little burying of the hatchet on both sides. The King spoke to one or two of the Prince’s followers. The Prince unbent, and addressed a few courtesies to his father’s attending Ministers, and the thing was over.

The reconciliation, however, appears to have been universally regarded as an accomplished fact, and the Gentleman’s Magazine, in its next issue, thus records it:—

Wednesday, February 17th, 1742.

“Several messages having passed yesterday between his Majesty and the Prince of Wales, his Royal Highness waited on his Majesty at St. James’s about one o’clock this day, and met with a most gracious reception. Great joy was shown in all parts of the kingdom upon this happy reconciliation.”

This reconciliation is said to have been worth an additional fifty thousand pounds a year to the Prince, and Horace Walpole remarks on it.

“He will have money now to tune Glover and Thompson and Dodsley again, et spes et ratio studiorum in Cæsare tantum.”

The whole of the Royal Family went after this together to the Duchess of Norfolk’s—the old house by the river, no doubt—the streets being “illuminated and bonfired.” There were pageants and reviews to celebrate the reconciliation, and the Prince and Princess made a sort of triumphal progress through the city to show themselves to their good friends the Corporation; then entering their barges at the Tower steps they finished up the day in a very sensible manner by dining at Greenwich, where they no doubt partook of whitebait and turtle.

Those processions of gilded barges on the Thames, accompanied as they generally were by music, must have been stately sights for the citizens to view, and much missed when the river became too crowded and dirty to be used as a royal highway.

In 1743 died Schulemberg, the mistress of George the First, whom he created Duchess of Kendal. The Emperor of Germany had also for some unstated reason conferred on her the dignity of Princess of Eberstein.

She died at the age of eighty-five, possessed of great wealth, which she bequeathed to Lady Walsingham, generally supposed to be her daughter by George the First.

Lady Walsingham had previously married Lord Chesterfield.

“But, I believe,” remarks Horace Walpole, “that he will get nothing by the Duchess’s death but his wife. She lived in the house with the Duchess”—next door in Grosvenor Square, “where he had played away all his credit.”

But at this time war clouds were hanging over Europe, and King George had espoused the cause of Queen Maria Theresa of Hungary. Very soon his attention was drawn from his eldest son to be centred in this cause, in which his favourite son William took a part.

CHAPTER XXV.
The Battle of Dettingen.

On the 21st of April, 1743, King George prorogued Parliament, and almost immediately hastened over to Hanover accompanied by his son, William, Duke of Cumberland, and Lord Carteret as Secretary of State, in attendance. The object of this departure was to aid Queen Maria Theresa of Hungary in her struggle against the French and Bavarians, and in so doing to gratify an ambition long cherished by King George to place himself at the head of an allied army. For whatever failings the little King is credited with, and we know he had many—those foiblesses of which we have been so frequently reminded—he was certainly a soldier, and a brave one.

Probably also he had a great desire to establish a reputation as a soldier for his favourite son William, also, that young man having at a very early period displayed a considerable penchant for the military art.

This preference for his brother was very far from gratifying to the Prince of Wales, who would have much liked to have gone to the wars himself, although his training had never been in that direction.

But to give him a command was about the last thing that King George would have thought of doing. Such an act would have given his eldest son fresh popularity, which he was far from desiring.

Not only was Frederick denied a command, but he was also excluded from the regency which his father left behind him. Sir Robert Walpole remarked as follows upon it:

“I think the Prince might have been of it, when Lord Gower is. I don’t think the latter more Jacobite than his Royal Highness.” So once more, as far as any active participation in the affairs of the state were concerned, the Prince of Wales was left in the galling position of being on the shelf.

Meanwhile the British troops under the Earl of Stair, had commenced their march towards the end of February into Germany, but appear to have moved with incredible slowness as it was the middle of May before they crossed the Rhine.

Lord Stair—the celebrated correspondent of Sarah Duchess of Marlborough,—appears to have been a very poor sort of a general, and in addition was hampered for want of a proper commissariat, which was not understood in those days.

There appeared to be the same happy-go-lucky state of affairs—which seems to be national and chronic—to which the great Marlborough referred in 1702, by calling his native country: “England that is famous for negligence.”[66] Lord Stair’s army, however, struggled onward, and was joined on the way by some sixteen thousand Hanoverians in British pay, who had been in winter quarters in Liège, and by a few Austrian regiments. Eventually they all arrived at Hochst, between Mayence and Frankfort, and here Lord Stair’s command numbered about forty thousand men.

Meanwhile, the French commander-in-chief, the Maréchal de Noailles, with sixty-thousand men, crossed the Rhine and approached the Southern bank of the River Maine, the northern bank of which was occupied by the British.

It is an extraordinary thing that although these two armies stood facing one another, prepared for battle—a battle which came off very soon—their respective countries had not broken off diplomatic relations with one another.

Horace Walpole refers to it as follows:

“A ridiculous situation! we have the name of War with Spain without the thing, and War with France without the name.”

Lord Stair appears to have entirely lost his head under these circumstances and to have made a series of imbecile marches and countermarches, which thoroughly tired out his horses and men and left him and his army at their conclusion in a worse position than they were before, with the addition that they were exceeding short of food and forage. The French General had entirely out-manœuvred Stair.

At this juncture—19th July, 1743—King George and his son, the Duke of Cumberland, joined the English army, which was at that time hemmed in in a narrow valley extending from Aschaffenberg to the considerable village of Dettingen on the north bank of the River Maine.

Here, after several counsels of War, it was decided to fall back on Hanau, a town where a magazine of provisions had been established. At this period the horses had but two days’ rations of forage left, all other supplies being cut off by the French.

The difficult retreat was commenced in face of the enemy—on the other bank of the River Maine—who immediately, as might have been expected from such a celebrated General as de Noailles, pontooned the river, and sent twenty-three thousand men across, under his nephew the Duc de Grammont to stop the retreat of the British and their allies at the defile of Dettingen, through which they must pass to reach their supplies at Hanau, sixteen miles further on.

So that the battle of Dettingen may be referred to as a “bread-and-butter” fight on the part of the British, who fought possibly all the better on that account.

The march of the English on Dettingen began before daylight on the 27th of June, the King at first commanding the rear guard, which was considered through ignorance of the movements of the French, to be the point of danger.

When, however, the advance guard was driven in at Dettingen and French troops came pouring across the river, King George and his son rode along the column to the front, where they appear to have taken supreme command at once.

Now the British Army was in a very tight corner indeed; no sooner had they marched than the Marquis de Noailles, perfectly alive to the situation, sent twelve thousand men to occupy Aschaffenberg in their rear; thus with twenty-three thousand men in a strong entrenched position in their front between them and their stores of food, the river on their left, and a force of twelve thousand in their rear, the position of the British looked pretty hopeless, hemmed in as they were in addition by hills on the right. Across the river a strong force of artillery was posted, which commenced a heavy fire into the left flank of our regiments, mowing down whole ranks. It was a position which at any moment might have been turned into a panic. That it was not turned into a panic and a rout is entirely owing to the courage and military skill of George the Second.

As far as courage was concerned, he was ably seconded by his son the Duke of Cumberland, but as this was his first fight, his military knowledge was nil, and it never shone particularly at any time after.

With all his faults and frailties and “foiblesses,” little King George on this day showed himself to be a skilled soldier, and a brave man. His previous reputation gained at Oudenarde had not been forgotten by our own poets when he came to England and became Prince of Wales; one of them had thus addressed him on a birthday:—

“Let Oudenarde’s field your courage tell

Who looked so martial, or who fought so well?

Who charg’d the foe with greater fire or force?

Who felt unmoved the trembling falling horse?

Sound, sound, O Fame, the trumpet loud and true,

All, all, this blaze to my Prince George is due.

In early life such deeds in arms were done

As prove you able to defend the throne.”

He had then a well-established reputation for courage, which was no doubt well known to the men he commanded.

The King and his son rode from their station in the rear to the front, and there the former at once deployed the columns into line with the left resting on the river and the right on the slopes of the hills at the other side of the valley. The infantry were in front with the half-starved cavalry in reserve.

The British Army was in presence of perhaps the most accomplished general of his time, Maréchal Noailles, and he had selected his position before Dettingen—an old post village—with consummate judgment.

It had a ravine, the course of a small rivulet running across its front, while its right flank rested on a morass and the river. The only mistake the Maréchal had made was in placing his hot-headed nephew the Duc de Grammont in command of it. This circumstance led to a big stroke of luck in King George’s favour at the very commencement of the action.

The Duc de Grammont committed the common and deadly error of despising his enemy; believing the advancing force to be but a part of the British Army, he left his entrenchments with the object apparently, of crushing it before its main body came up, but it was in fact the main body, which he had to engage. This advance had a double effect in favour of King George; the French guns across the river, which had been making fearful play on the English ranks, had to cease fire, as the French very soon came in close proximity to their foes, and were as likely to be hit by their own gunners as the English. Therefore our men were relieved from this demoralizing flank fire. This movement of the Duc de Grammont rendered the excellent dispositions of his uncle valueless.

But an untoward incident, at the very commencement, delayed for a time the fruits of this error being gathered and very nearly deprived the British Army of its royal commander; King George’s horse ran away with him in the direction of the enemy.

This was a paralysing spectacle for our own men!

Fortunately, however, the King succeeded in pulling him round before he got close enough for the French to grab him, and he returned in safety if not in triumph to his own lines. This incident, however, determined the brave little man to take a certain course; he got off his horse.

“I vill go on my legs,” he remarked cheerfully, “dey cannot run away with me!”

But the enemy’s cavalry, composed of the élite of the French Army, were now advancing; the King drew his sword and placed himself at the head of his Grenadiers. Waving his sword, he cheered them on, the last King of England who led his soldiers into battle.

“Now boys,” he cried, “now for the honour of England; fire and behave bravely, and the French will soon run!”

All this was very fine, but the French did not run, at first; they came on in a wild charge and considerably shook our infantry, so much so, that it required all the energy of the King and his son—who, with the rank of Major-General, led the left wing—to get them steady again. The father and son certainly did not spare themselves on this day; even when the Duke was wounded in the leg he refused to leave the field. No wonder that poor Frederick at home was boiling with jealousy.

Maréchal Noailles from the other side of the river, where he was organizing a supporting movement, saw his nephew’s error, and hastened back to Dettingen; but he arrived too late.

King George, at the head of a brigade of infantry, had swept the French from their position and cleared the road to Hanau and the much needed food and stores. The French loss in the retreat was frightfully heavy, and the French Maréchal very wisely drew off the remainder of his troops to the other side of the river, with a list of killed and wounded which totalled up to six thousand men.

Thus ended the Battle of Dettingen, concerning King George’s part in which, Justin McCarthy in his “Four Georges,” makes the following comment:—

“George behaved with a great courage and spirit. If the poor, stupid, puffy, plucky little man did but know what a strange, picturesque, memorable figure he was as he stood up against the enemy at the Battle of Dettingen! The last King of England who ever appeared with his army in the battlefield. There, as he gets down off his unruly horse, determined to trust to his own stout legs—because as he says, they will not run away—there is the last successor of the Williams, and the Edwards, and the Henrys; the last successor of the Conqueror, and Edward the First, and the Black Prince, and Henry the Fourth, and Henry of Agincourt, and William of Nassau; the last English King who faces a foe in battle.”