George loved to hear his Dettingen glories eulogised in annual odes sung before him. But, brave as he was, he had not much cause for boasting. The Dettingen laurels were changed into cypress at Fontenoy by the Duke of Cumberland in 1744, whose suppression of the Scottish rebellion in 1745 gained for him more credit than he deserved. The treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, by which our Continental war was concluded in 1748, gave peace to England, but little or no glory.
The intervening years were years of interest to some of the children of Caroline. Thus, in June 1746, the Prince of Hesse came over to England to marry the second daughter of Caroline, the Princess Mary. He was royally entertained; but on one occasion met with an accident which Walpole calls ‘a most ridiculous tumble t’other night at the opera. They had not pegged up his box tight after the ridotto, and down he came on all fours. George Selwyn says he carried it off with an unembarrassed countenance.’
In a year Mary was glad to escape from the brutality of her husband and repair to England, under pretext of being obliged to drink the Bath waters. She was an especial favourite with her brother, the Duke of Cumberland, and with the Princess Caroline.
The result of this marriage gave little trouble to the King. He was much more annoyed when the Prince of Wales formally declared a new opposition (in 1747), which was never to subside till he was on the throne. ‘He began it pretty handsomely, the other day,’ says Walpole, ‘with 143 to 184, which has frightened the ministry like a bomb. This new party wants nothing but heads; though not having any,’ says Horace, wittily, ‘to be sure the struggle is fairer.’ It was led by Lord Baltimore, a man with ‘a good deal of jumbled knowledge.’ The spirit of the father certainly dwelt in some of his children. The King, we are told, sent Steinberg, on one occasion, to examine the prince’s children in their learning. The boy, Prince Edward, acquitted himself well in his Latin grammar, but Steinberg told him that it would please his Majesty and profit the prince, if the latter would attend more to attain proficiency in the German language. ‘German, German!’ said the boy; ‘any dull child can learn that!’ The prince, as he said it, ‘squinted’ at the baron, and the baron was doubtless but little flattered by the remark or the look of the boy. The King was probably as surprised and as little pleased to hear the remark as he was a few months later to discover that the Prince of Wales and the Jacobite party had united in a combined parliamentary opposition against the government. However, Prince Edward’s remark and the Prince of Wales’s opposition did not prevent the King from conferring the Order of the Garter on the little Prince George in 1749. The youthful knight, afterwards King of England, was carried in his father’s arms to the door of the King’s closet. There the Duke of Dorset received him, and carried him to the King. The boy then commenced a speech, which had been taught him by his tutor, Ayscough, Dean of Bristol. His father no sooner heard the oration commenced, than he interrupted its progress by a vehement ‘No, no!’ The boy, embarrassed, stopped short; then, after a moment of hesitation, recommenced his complimentary harangue; but, with the opening words, again came the prohibitory ‘No, no!’ from the prince, and thus was the eloquence of the young chevalier rudely silenced.
But it was not only the peace of the King, his very palaces were put in peril at this time. The installation of Lady Yarmouth at Kensington, after the fracas occasioned by Lady Deloraine, had nearly resulted in the destruction of the palace. Lady Yarmouth resided in the room which had been occupied by Lady Suffolk, who disregarded damp, and cared nothing for the crop of fungi raised by it in her room. Not so Lady Yarmouth, at least after she had contracted an ague. She then kept up such a fire that the woodwork caught, and destruction to the edifice was near upon following. There were vacant chambers enough, and sufficiently comfortable; but the King would not allow them to be inhabited, even by his favourite. ‘The King hoards all he can,’ writes Walpole, ‘and has locked up half the palace since the Queen’s death; so he does at St. James’s; and I believe would put the rooms out at interest if he could get a closet a-year for them.’
The division which had again sprung up between sire and son daily widened until death relieved the former of his permanent source of vexation. This event took place in 1751. Some few years previous to that period, the Prince of Wales, when playing at tennis or cricket, at Cliefden, received a blow from a ball, which gave him some pain, but of which he thought little. It was neglected; and one result of such neglect was a permanent weakness of the lungs. In the early part of this year he had suffered from pleurisy, but had recovered—at least, partially recovered. A previous fall from his horse had rendered him more than usually delicate. Early in March he had been in attendance at the House of Lords on occasion of the King, his father, giving his royal sanction to some bills. This done, the prince returned, much heated, in a chair with the windows down, to Carlton House. He changed his dress, put on light, unaired clothing, and, as if that had not been perilous enough, he had the madness, after hurrying to Kew and walking about the gardens there in very inclement weather, to lie down for three hours after his return to Carlton House, upon a couch in a very cold room which opened upon the gardens. Lord Egmont alluded to the danger of such a course; the prince laughed at the thought. He was as obstinate as his father, to whom Sir Robert Walpole once observed, on finding him equally intractable during a fit of illness, ‘Sir, do you know what your father died of? Of thinking he could not die.’ The prince removed to Leicester House. He ridiculed good counsel, and before the next morning his life was in danger. He rallied, and during one of his hours of least suffering he sent for his eldest son, and, embracing him with tenderness, remarked, ‘Come, George, let us be good friends while we are permitted to be so.’ Three physicians, with Wilmot and Hawkins, the surgeons, were in constant attendance upon him, and, curiously enough, their united wisdom pronounced that the prince was out of danger only the day before he died. Then came a relapse, an eruption of the skin, a marked difficulty of breathing, and an increase of cough. Still he was not considered in danger. Some members of his family were at cards in the adjacent room, and Desnoyers, the celebrated dancing-master, who, like St. Leon, was as good a violinist as he was a dancer, was playing the violin at the prince’s bedside, when the latter was seized with a violent fit of coughing. When this had ceased, Wilmot expressed a hope that his royal patient would be better, and would pass a quiet night. Hawkins detected symptoms which he thought of great gravity. The cough returned with increased violence, and Frederick, placing his hand upon his stomach, murmured feebly, ‘Je sens la mort!’ (‘I feel death!’). Desnoyers held him up, and feeling him shiver, exclaimed, ‘The prince is going!’ At that moment the Princess of Wales was at the foot of the bed: she caught up a candle, rushed to the head of the bed, and, bending down over her husband’s face, she saw that he was dead.
So ended the wayward life of the elder son of Caroline; so terminated the married life of him, which began so gaily when he was gliding about the crowd in his nuptial chamber, in a gown and night-cap of silver tissue. The bursting of an imposthume between the pericardium and diaphragm, the matter of which fell upon the lungs, suddenly killed him whom the heralds called ‘high and mighty prince,’ and the heir to a throne lay dead in the arms of a French fiddler. Les extrêmes se touchent!—though Desnoyers, be it said, was quite as honest a man as his master.
Intelligence of the death of his son was immediately conveyed to George II., by Lord North. The King was at Kensington, and when the messenger stood at his side and communicated in a whisper the doleful news, his Majesty was looking over a card-table at which the players were the Princess Amelia, the Duchess of Dorset, the Duke of Grafton, and the Countess of Yarmouth. He turned to the messenger, and merely remarked in a low voice, ‘Dead, is he? Why, they told me he was better;’ and then going round to his mistress, the Countess of Yarmouth, he very calmly observed to her, ‘Countess, Fred is gone!’ And that was all the sorrow expressed by a father at the loss of a first-born boy, who had outlived his father’s love. The King, however, sent kind messages to the widow, who exhibited on the occasion much courage and sense.
As the prince died without priestly aid, so was his funeral unattended by a single bishop to do him honour or pay him respect. With the exception of Frederick’s own household and the lords appointed to hold the pall, ‘there was not present one English lord, not one bishop, and only one Irish peer (Limerick), two sons of dukes, one baron’s son, and two privy councillors.’ It was not that want of respect was intentional, but that no due notice was issued from any office as to the arrangement of the funeral. The body was carried from the House of Lords to Westminster Abbey, but without a canopy, and the funeral service was performed, undignified by either anthem or organ.
But the prince’s friend, Bubb Dodington, poured out a sufficient quantity of expressed grief to serve the entire nation, and make up for all lack of ceremony or of sorrow elsewhere. In a letter to Mann, he swore that the prince was the delight, ornament, and expectation of the world. In losing him the wretched had lost their refuge, balm, and shelter. Art, science, and grace had to deplore the loss of a patron, and in that loss a remedy for the ills of society had perished also! ‘Bubb de Tristibus’ goes on to say, that he had lost more than any other man by the death of the prince, seeing that his highness had condescended to stoop to him, and be his own familiar friend. Bubb protested that if he ever allowed the wounds of his grief to heal he should be for ever infamous, and finally running a-muck with his figures of speech, he declares—‘I should be unworthy of all consolation if I was not inconsolable.’ This is the spirit of a partisan; but, on the other side, the spirit of party was never exhibited in a more malignantly petty aspect than on the occasion of the death of the prince. The gentlemen of his bedchamber were ordered to be in attendance near the body, from ten in the morning till the conclusion of the funeral. The government, however, would order them no refreshment, and the Board of Green Cloth would provide them with none, without such order. Even though princes die, il faut que tout le monde vive; and accordingly these poor gentlemen sent to a neighbouring tavern and gave orders for a cold dinner to be furnished them. The authorities were too tardily ashamed of thus insulting faithful servants of rank and distinction, and commanded the necessary refreshments to be provided. They were accepted, but the tavern dinner was paid for and given to the poor.