The reconciliation was worth an additional fifty thousand pounds a-year to the prince, so that obedience to a father could hardly be more munificently rewarded. ‘He will have money now,’ says Walpole, ‘to tune up Glover, and Thomson, and Dodsley again:—
Et spes et ratio studiorum in Cæsare tantum.’
There was much outward show of gladness at this court, pageants and ‘reviews to gladden the heart of David and triumphs of Absalom,’ as Walpole styles his Majesty and the heir-apparent. The latter, with the princess, went ‘in great parade through the city and the dust to dine at Greenwich. They took water at the Tower, and trumpeting away to Grace Tosier’s—
Like Cimon, triumphed over land and wave.’
In another direction, there were some lively proceedings, which would have amused Caroline herself. Tranquil and dull as Kensington Palace looks, its apartments were occasionally the scene of more rude than royal fracas. Thus we are told of one of the daughters of the King pulling a chair from under the Countess Deloraine, just as that not too exemplary lady was about to sit down to cards. His Majesty laughed at the lady’s tumble, at which she was so doubly pained, that, watching for revenge and opportunity, she contrived to give the Sovereign just such another fall. The sacred person of the King was considerably bruised, and the trick procured nothing more for the countess than exclusion from court, where her place of favour was exclusively occupied by Madame Walmoden, Countess of Yarmouth.
We often hear of the wits of one era being the butts of the next, and without wit enough left to escape the shafts let fly at them. Walpole thus describes a drawing-room held at St. James’s, to which some courtiers resorted in the dresses they had worn under Queen Anne. ‘There were so many new faces,’ says Horace, ‘that I scarce knew where I was; I should have taken it for Carlton House, or my Lady Mayoress’s visiting day, only the people did not seem enough at home, but rather as admitted to see the King dine in public. It is quite ridiculous to see the number of old ladies, who, from having been wives of patriots, have not been dressed these twenty years; out they come with all the accoutrements that were in use in Queen Anne’s days. Then the joy and awkward jollity of them is inexpressible; they titter, and, wherever you meet them, are always going to court, and looking at their watches an hour before the time. I met several at the birth-day, and they were dressed in all the colours of the rainbow; they seem to have said to themselves twenty years ago: “Well; if I ever do go to court again, I will have a pink and silver, or a blue and silver,” and they kept their resolutions.’
The English people had now been long looking towards that great battle-field of Europe, Flanders, mingling memories of past triumphs with hopes of future victories. George II. went heartily into the cause of Maria Theresa, when the French sought to deprive her of her imperial inheritance. In the campaign which ensued was fought that battle of Dettingen which Lord Stair so nearly lost, where George behaved so bravely, mounted or a-foot, and where the Scots Greys enacted their bloody and triumphant duel with the gens-d’arme of France.
Meanwhile, Frederick was unemployed. When the King and the Duke of Cumberland proceeded to the army in Flanders, a regency was formed, of which Walpole says, ‘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.’
When the King and the duke returned from their triumphs on the Continent, the former younger for his achievements, the latter older by the gout and an accompanying limp, London gave them a reception worthy of the most renowned of heroes. In proportion as the King saw himself popular with the citizens did he cool towards the Prince of Wales. The latter, with his two sisters, stood on the stairs of St. James’s Palace to receive the chief hero; but though the princess was only confined the day before, and Prince George lay ill of the small-pox, the King passed by his son without offering him a word or otherwise noticing him. This rendered the King unpopular, without turning the popular affection towards the elder son of Caroline. Nor was that son deserving of such affection. His heart had few sympathies for England, nor was he elated by her victories or made sad by her defeats. On the contrary, in 1745, when the news arrived in England of the ‘tristis gloria,’ the illustrious disaster at Fontenoy, which made so many hearts in England desolate, Frederick went to the theatre in the evening, and two days after, he wrote a French ballad, ‘Bacchic, Anacreontic, and Erotic,’ addressed to those ladies with whom he was going to act in Congreve’s masque, ‘The Judgment of Paris.’ It was full of praise of late and deep drinking, of intercourse with the fair, of stoical contempt for misfortune, of expressed indifference whether Europe had one or many tyrants, and of a pococurantism for all things and forms except his chère Sylvie, by whom he was good-naturedly supposed to mean his wife. But this solitary civility cannot induce us to change our self-gratulation at the fact that a man with such a heart was not permitted to ascend the throne of Great Britain. In the year after he wrote the ballad alluded to, he created a new opposition against the crown, by the counsels of Lord Bath, ‘who got him from Lord Granville: the latter and his faction acted with the court.’ Of the princess, Walpole says, ‘I firmly believe, by all her quiet sense, she will turn out a Caroline.’
In this year, 1743, died that favourite of George I. who more than any other woman had enjoyed in his household and heart the place which should have belonged to his wife Sophia Dorothea. Mademoiselle von der Schulenburg, of the days of the Electorate, died Duchess of Kendal by favour of the King of England, and Princess of Eberstein by favour of the Emperor of Germany. She died at the age of eighty-five, immensely rich. Her wealth was inherited by her so-called ‘niece,’ Lady Walsingham, who married Lord Chesterfield. ‘But I believe,’ says Walpole, ‘that he will get nothing by the duchess’s death—but his wife. She lived in the house with the duchess, where he had played away all his credit.’