George was right in his criticism, but rather coarse than king-like in expressing it. Walpole too, it may be noticed, misquotes what his friend Mrs. Clive said in her character of Lettice, and he misquotes evidently for the purpose of making the story more pointed against the King, who was as sensitive upon the point of age as Louis XIV. himself. Lettice does not say to Oldcastle ‘you are villainously old.’ She merely states the three obstacles to Oldcastle marrying her young mistress. ‘In the first place your great age; you are at least some sixty-six. Then there is, in the second place, your terrible ungenteel air; and thirdly, that horrible face of yours, which it is impossible for any one to see without being frightened.’ She does, however, add a phrase which must have sounded harshly on the ear of a sensitive and sexagenarian King; though not more so than on that of any other auditor of the same age. ‘I think you could not have the conscience to live above a year or a year and a half at most.’ The royal criticism, then, was correct, however roughly expressed.
In the same year, 1751, died another of the children of George and Caroline—Louisa, Queen of Denmark. She had only reached her twenty-seventh year, and had been eight years married. Her mother loved her, and the nation admired her for her grace, amiability, and talents. Her career, in many respects, resembled that of her mother. She was married to a king who kept a mistress in order that the world should think he was independent of all influence on the part of his wife. She was basely treated by this king; but not a word of complaint against him entered into the letters which this spirited and sensible woman addressed to her relations. Indeed, she had said at the time of her marriage that, if she should become unhappy, her family should never know anything about it. She died, in the flower of her age, a terrible death, as Walpole calls it, and after an operation which lasted an hour. The cause of it was the neglect of a slight rupture, occasioned by stooping suddenly when enceinte, the injury resulting from which she imprudently and foolishly concealed. This is all the more strange, as her mother, on her death-bed, said to her: ‘Louisa, remember I die by being giddy and obstinate, in having kept my disorder a secret.’ Her farewell letter to her father and family, a most touching address, and the similitude of her fate to that of her mother, sensibly affected the almost dried-up heart of the King. ‘This has been a fatal year to my family,’ groaned the son of Sophia Dorothea. ‘I lost my eldest son, but I was glad of it. Then the Prince of Orange died, and left everything in confusion. Poor little Edward has been cut open for an imposthume in his side; and now the Queen of Denmark is gone! I know I did not love my children when they were young; I hated to have them coming into the room; but now I love them as well as most fathers.’
The Countess of Suffolk (the servant of Caroline and the mistress of Caroline’s husband) was among the few persons whom the eloquence and fervour of Whitfield failed to touch. When this latter was chaplain to Lady Huntingdon, and in the habit of preaching in the drawing-room of that excellent and exemplary woman, there was an eager desire to be among the privileged to be admitted to hear him. This privilege was solicited of Lady Huntingdon by Lady Rockingham, for the King’s ex-favourite, Lady Suffolk. The patroness of Whitfield thought of Magdalen repentant, and expressed her readiness to welcome her, an additional sheep to an increasing flock. The beauty came, and Whitfield preached neither more nor less earnestly, unconscious of her presence. So searching, however, was his sermon, and so readily could the enraged fair one apply its terrible truths to herself, that it was only with difficulty she could sit it out with apparent calm. Inwardly, she felt that she had been the especial object at which her assailant had flung his sharpest arrows. Accordingly, when Whitfield had retired, the exquisite fury, chafed but not repentant, turned upon the meditative Lady Huntingdon, and well nigh annihilated her with the torrent and power of her invective. Her sister-in-law, Lady Betty Germain, implored her to be silent; but only the more unreservedly did she empty the vials of her wrath upon the saintly lady of the house, who was lost in astonishment, anger, and confusion. Old Lady Bertie and the Dowager Duchess of Ancaster rose to her rescue; and, by right of their relationship with the lady whom the King delighted to honour, required her to be silent or civil. It was all in vain: the irritated fair one maintained that she had been brought there to be pilloried by the preacher; and she finally swept out of the room, leaving behind her an assembly in various attitudes of wonder and alarm; some fairly deafened by the thundering echoes of her expressed wrath, others at a loss to decide whether Lady Huntingdon had or had not directed the arrows of the preacher, and all most charmingly unconscious that, be that as it might, the lady was only smarting because she had rubbed against a sermon bristling with the most stinging truths.
Whitfield made note of those of the royal household who repaired to the services over which he presided in Lady Huntingdon’s house. In 1752, when he saw regularly attending among his congregation one of Queen Caroline’s ex-ladies, Mrs. Grinfield, he writes thereupon: ‘One of Cæsar’s household hath been lately awakened by her ladyship’s instrumentality, and I hope others will meet with the like blessing.’
In 1755 England and France were at issue touching their possessions in Canada. The dispute resulted in a war; and the war brought with it the temporary loss of the Electorate of Hanover to England, and much additional disgrace; which last was not wiped out till the great Pitt was at the helm, and by his spirited administration helped England to triumph in every quarter of the globe. Amid misfortune or victory, however, the King, as outwardly ‘impassible’ as ever, took also less active share in public events than he did of old; and he lived with the regularity of a man who has a regard for his health. Every night, at nine o’clock, he sat down to cards. The party generally consisted of his two daughters, the Princesses Amelia and Caroline, two or three of the late Queen’s ladies, and as many of the gentlemen of the household—whose presence there was a proof of the Sovereign’s personal esteem for them. Had none other been present, the party would have been one on which remark would not be called for. But at the same table with the children of good Queen Caroline was seated their father’s mistress, the naturalised German Baroness Walmoden—Countess of Yarmouth. George II. had no idea that the presence of such a woman was an outrage committed upon his own children. Every Saturday, in summer, he carried those ladies, but without his daughters, to Richmond. They went in coaches-and-six, in the middle of the day, with the heavy horse-guards kicking up the dust before them—dined, walked an hour in the garden, returned in the same dusty parade; and his Majesty fancied himself the most gallant and lively prince in Europe.[44]
He had leisure, however, to think of the establishment of the sons of Frederick; and in 1756 George II. sent a message to his grandson, now Prince of Wales, whereby he offered him 40,000l. a-year and apartments at Kensington and St. James’s. The prince accepted the allowance, but declined the residence, on the ground that separation from his mother would be painful to her. When this plea was made, the prince, as Dodington remarks in his diary, did not live with his mother, either in town or country. The prince’s brother Edward, afterwards created Duke of York, was furnished with a modest revenue of 5,000l. a-year. The young prince is said to have been not insensible to the attractions of Lady Essex, daughter of Sir Charles Williams. ‘The prince,’ says Walpole, ‘has got his liberty, and seems extremely disposed to use it, and has great life and good humour. She has already made a ball for him. Sir Richard Lyttelton was so wise as to make her a visit, and advise her not to meddle with politics; that the Princess (Dowager of Wales) would conclude that it was a plan laid for bringing together Prince Edward and Mr. Fox. As Mr. Fox was not just the person my Lady Essex was thinking of bringing together with Prince Edward, she replied, very cleverly, “And, my dear Sir Richard, let me advise you not to meddle with politics neither.”’
From the attempt to establish the Prince of Wales under his own superintendence, the King was called to mourn over the death of another child.
The truth-loving Caroline Elizabeth was unreservedly beloved by her parents, was worthy of the affection, and repaid it by an ardent attachment. She was fair, good, accomplished, and unhappy. The cause of her unhappiness may be perhaps more than guessed at in the circumstance of her retiring from the world on the death of Lord Hervey. The sentiment with which he had, for the sake of vanity or ambition, inspired her was developed into a sort of motherly love for his children, for whom she exhibited great and constant regard. Therewith she was conscious of but one strong desire—a desire to die. For many years previous to her decease she lived in her father’s palace, literally ‘cloistered up,’ inaccessible to nearly all, yet with active sympathy for the poor and suffering classes in the metropolis.
Walpole, speaking of the death of the Princess Caroline, the third daughter of George II., says: ‘Though her state of health had been so dangerous for years, and her absolute confinement for many of them, her disorder was, in a manner, new and sudden, and her death unexpected by herself, though earnestly her wish. Her goodness was constant and uniform, her generosity immense, her charities most extensive; in short, I, no royalist, could be lavish in her praise. What will divert you is that the Duke of Norfolk’s and Lord Northumberland’s upper servants have asked leave to put themselves in mourning, not out of regard for this admirable princess, but to be more sur le bon ton. I told the duchess I supposed they would expect her to mourn hereafter for their relations.’
The princess died in December 1757, and early in the following year the King was seized with a serious fit of illness, which terminated in a severe attack of gout, ‘which had never been at court above twice in his reign,’ says Walpole, and the appearance of which was considered as giving the royal sufferer a chance of five or six years more of life. But it was not to be so; for the old royal lion in the Tower had just expired, and people who could ‘put that and that together’ could not but pronounce oraculary that the royal man would follow the royal brute. ‘Nay,’ says Lord Chesterfield to his son, ‘this extravagancy was believed by many above people.’ The fine gentleman means that it was believed by many of his own class.