One Sunday, when the princess was preparing to go to church, her son asked if he might accompany her. She was surprised, because he had never made such a request before, but gave permission. Then the little Duke of Gloucester ran to inform his governess, Lady Fitzharding, who asked him if he would say the psalms,—a performance to which he had always objected.
"I will sing them," proudly replied the boy; thus showing the effect of his aged friend's instruction.
One day, while the princess was making her toilet, the boy looked up into her face and asked: "Mamma, why have you two chaplains, and I but one?"
"Pray," returned the mother, with an amused smile, "what do you give your one chaplain?" She merely asked this question to hear what sort of a reply her son would make, and to find out whether he knew that the chaplains of the royal household received no pay.
The little duke looked at her earnestly for a moment, and then said: "Mamma, I give him his liberty!"
The princess laughed heartily at the little boy's unconscious repartee.
On his return to Campden House the Duke of Gloucester found his soldier company posted as sentinels on guard, and they received their commander with presented arms and all the honors of war. After that the daily drill took place regularly on an open plain, called Wormwood Common. One morning the duke fell with a pistol in his hand, and hurt his forehead against it. The wound was still bleeding when he reached Campden House, and the ladies began to pity him; but he put on a bold air and told them "that a bullet had grazed his forehead, but that as a soldier he could not cry when wounded."
There was so much ceremony observed among the royal attendants all the time that Mr. Tratt, the tutor, considered it an infringement of his rights when Jenkins, the Welsh usher, undertook to give the Duke of Gloucester his first lessons in fencing and mathematics.
The child ran to his mother every time he learned anything new to make a display of his knowledge; but Jenkins was told to "mind his own business" by those who considered that he ought to be otherwise employed. Lady Fitz-harding, in particular, found great fault with his filling the duke's head with such "stuff" as mathematics, and seemed to regard the figures drawn in geometry some sort of magic-signs that savored of witchcraft. But her husband eased her mind by assuring her that Lewis Jenkins "was a good youth, who had read much, but meant no harm." The princess ordered Lord Fitzharding to hinder Jenkins from teaching her son anything, because he might get wrong ideas, that it would be hard to correct when he began to study according to the regular method.
Shortly after she saw the duke fencing with a wooden sword, and defending himself against the attack of an imaginary foe. "I thought I forbade your people to fence with you," observed her royal highness.