It was not the old King, however, who was first to be summoned from the royal circle by the Inevitable Angel. A young princess passed away before the more aged Sovereign. Walpole has a word or two to say upon the death of the Princess Elizabeth, the second daughter of Frederick, Prince of Wales, who died in the September of this year. The immediate cause of death was an inflammation, which carried her off in two days. ‘Her figure,’ he says, ‘was so very unfortunate that it would have been difficult for her to be happy; but her parts and application were extraordinary. I saw her act in “Cato” at eight years old (when she could not stand alone, but was forced to lean against the side-scene), better than any of her brothers and sisters. She had been so unhealthy that, at that age, she had not been taught to read, but had learned the part of Lucia by hearing the others study their parts. She went to her father and mother, and begged she might act. They put her off as gently as they could; she desired leave to repeat her part, and when she did, it was with so much sense, that there was no denying her.’

Before George’s hour had yet come, another child was to precede the aged father to the tomb. In 1759 Anne, the eldest and least loved of the daughters of Caroline, died in Holland. At the period of her birth, the 9th of October 1709, her godmother, Queen Anne, was occupying the throne of England; her grandfather, George, was Elector of Hanover; Sophia Dorothea was languishing in the castle of Ahlden, and her father and mother bore the title of Electoral Prince and Princess. She was born at Hanover; and was five years old when, with her sister, Amelia Sophia, who was two years younger, her mother, the Princess Caroline, afterwards Queen, arrived in this country on the 15th of October 1714. She early exhibited a haughty and imperious disposition; possessed very little feeling for, and exercised very little gentleness towards, those who even rendered her a willing service. Queen Caroline sharply corrected this last defect. She discovered that the princess was accustomed to make one of her ladies-in-waiting stand by her bedside every night, and read aloud to her till she fell asleep. On one occasion the princess kept her lady standing so long, that she at last fainted from sheer fatigue. On the following night, when Queen Caroline had retired to rest, she sent for her offending daughter, and requested her to read aloud to her for a while. The princess was about to take a chair, but the Queen said she could hear her better if she read standing. Anne obeyed, and read till fatigue made her pause. ‘Go on,’ said the Queen; ‘it entertains me.’ Anne went on, sulkily and wearily; till, increasingly weary, she once more paused for rest and looked round for a seat. ‘Continue, continue,’ said the Queen, ‘I am not yet tired of listening.’ Anne burst into tears with vexation, and confessed that she was tired both of standing and reading, and was ready to sink with fatigue. ‘If you feel so faint from one evening of such employment, what must your attendants feel, upon whom you force the same discipline night after night? Be less selfish, my child, in future, and do not indulge in luxuries purchased at the cost of weariness and ill-health to others.’ Anne did not profit by the lesson; and few people were warmly attached to the proud and egotistical lady.

The princess spent nearly twenty years in England, and a little more than a quarter of a century in Holland; the last seven years of that period she was a widow. Her last thoughts were for the aggrandisement of her family; and, when she was battling with death, she rallied her strength in order to sign the contract of marriage between her daughter and the Prince Nassau Walberg, and to write a letter to the States General, requesting them to sanction the match. Having accomplished this, the eldest daughter of Caroline laid down the pen, and calmly awaited the death which was not long in coming.

It remains for us now only to speak of the demise of the husband of Caroline. On the night of Friday, the 25th of October 1760, the King retired to rest at an early hour, and well in health. At six (next morning) he drank his usual cup of chocolate, walked to the window, looked out upon Kensington Gardens, and made some observation upon the direction of the wind, which had lately delayed the mails from Holland, and which kept from him intelligence which he was anxious to receive, and which he was saved the pain of hearing. George had said to the page-in-waiting that he would take a turn in the garden; and he was on his way thither, at seven o’clock, when the attendant heard the sound of a fall. He entered the room through which the King was passing on his way to the garden, and he found George II. lying on the ground, with a wound on the right side of his face, caused by striking it in his fall against the side of a bureau. He could only say, ‘Send for Amelia,’ and then, gasping for breath, died. Whilst the sick, almost deaf, and purblind daughter of the King was sent for, the message being that her father wished to speak to her, the servants carried the body to the bed from which the King had so lately risen. They had not time to close the eyes, when the princess entered the room. Before they could inform her of the unexpected catastrophe, she had advanced to the bedside: she stooped over him, fancying that he was speaking to her, and that she could not hear his words. The poor lady was sensibly shocked; but she did not lose her presence of mind. She despatched messengers for surgeons and wrote to the Prince of Wales. The medical men were speedily in attendance; but he was beyond mortal help, and they could only conclude that the King had died of the rupture of some vessel of the heart, as he had for years been subject to palpitation of that organ. Dr. Beilby Porteous, in his panegyrising epitaph on the monarch, considers his death as having been appropriate and necessary. He had accomplished all for which he had been commissioned by Heaven, and had received all the rewards in return which Heaven could give to man on earth:—

No further blessing could on earth be given,

The next degree of happiness—was Heaven.

George II. died possessed of considerable personal property. Of this he bequeathed 50,000l. between the Duke of Cumberland and the Princesses Amelia and Mary. The share received by his daughters did not equal what he left to his last ‘favourite’—Lady Yarmouth. The legacy to that German lady, of whom he used to write to Queen Caroline from Hanover, ‘You must love the Walmoden, for she loves me,’ consisted of a cabinet and ‘contents,’ valued, it is said, at 11,000l. His son, the Duke of Cumberland, further received from him a bequest of 130,000l., placed on mortgages not immediately recoverable. The testator had originally bequeathed twice that amount to his son; but he revoked half, on the ground of the expenses of the war. He describes him as the best son that ever lived, and declares that he had never given him cause to be offended: ‘A pretty strong comment,’ as Horace Walpole remarks, when detailing the incidents of the King’s decease, ‘on the affair of Klosterseven.’ The King’s jewels were worth, according to Lady Suffolk, 150,000l.: of the best of them, which he kept in Hanover, he made crown jewels; the remainder, with some cabinets, were left to the duke. ‘Two days before the King died,’ says Walpole, ‘it happened oddly to my Lady Suffolk. She went to make a visit at Kensington, not knowing of the review. She found herself hemmed in by coaches, and was close to him whom she had not seen for so many years, and to my Lady Yarmouth; but they did not know her. It struck her, and has made her sensible to his death.’

Intelligence of the King’s decease was sent, as before said, to the Prince of Wales, by the Princess Amelia. The heir-apparent, however, received earlier intimation of the fact through a German valet-de-chambre, at Kensington. The latter despatched a note, which bore a private mark previously agreed upon, and which reached the heir to so much greatness as he was out riding. He knew what had happened by the sign. ‘Without surprise or emotion, without dropping a word that indicated what had happened, he said his horse was lame, and turned back to Kew. At dismounting he said to the groom: “I have said this horse was lame; I forbid you to say to the contrary.”’ If this story of Walpole’s be true, the longest reign in England started from a lie.

In the meantime there was the old King to bury, and he was consigned to the tomb with a ceremony which has been graphically pictured by Horace Walpole. He describes himself as attending the funeral, not as a mourner, but as ‘a rag of quality,’ in which character he walked, as affording him the best means of seeing the show. He pronounced it a noble sight, and he appears to have enjoyed it extremely. ‘The Prince’s chamber, hung with purple, and a quantity of silver lamps, the coffin under a canopy of purple velvet, and six vast chandeliers of silver, on high stands, had a very good effect. The procession, through a line of foot-guards, every seventh man bearing a torch—the horse-guards lining the outsides—their officers, with drawn sabres and crape sashes, on horseback—the drums muffled—the fifes—bells tolling—and minute guns—all this was very solemn.’ There was, however, something more exquisite still in the estimation of this very unsentimental rag of quality. ‘The charm,’ he says, ‘the charm was the entrance to the Abbey, where we were received by the dean and chapter in rich robes, the choir and almoners bearing torches; the whole Abbey so illuminated that one saw it to greater advantage than by day; the tombs, long aisles, and fretted roof all appearing distinctly, and with the happiest chiaro oscuro. There wanted nothing but incense and little chapels here and there, with priests saying mass for the repose of the defunct; yet one could not complain of its not being Catholic enough. I had been in dread of being coupled with some boy of ten years old; but the heralds were not very accurate, and I walked with George Grenville, taller and older, to keep me in countenance. When we came to the chapel of Henry VII. all solemnity and decorum ceased; no order was observed, people sat or stood where they could or would; the yeomen of the guard were crying out for help, oppressed by the immense weight of the coffin; the bishop read sadly, and blundered in the prayers. The fine chapter, Man that is born of a woman, was chanted, not read; and the anthem, besides being immeasurably tedious, would have served as well for a nuptial. The real serious part was the figure of the Duke of Cumberland, heightened by a thousand melancholy circumstances. He had a dark-brown adonis, with a cloak of black cloth, and a train of five yards. Attending the funeral of a father could not be pleasant; his leg extremely bad, yet forced to stand upon it near two hours; his face bloated and disturbed with his late paralytic stroke, which has affected, too, one of his eyes; and placed over the mouth of the vault, into which, in all probability, he must himself soon descend; think how unpleasant a situation. He bore it all with a firm and unaffected countenance. This grave scene was fully contrasted by the burlesque Duke of Newcastle. He fell into a fit of crying the moment he came into the chapel, and flung himself back into a stall, the archbishop hovering over him with a smelling-bottle; but in two minutes his curiosity got the better of his hypocrisy, and he ran about the chapel with his glass, to spy who was or who was not there, spying with one hand and mopping his eyes with the other. Then returned the fear of catching cold; and the Duke of Cumberland, who was sinking with heat, felt himself weighed down, and turning round, found it was the Duke of Newcastle standing upon his train to avoid the chill of the marble. It was very theatrical to look down into the vault, where the coffin lay attended by mourners with lights. Clavering, the groom of the chamber, refused to sit up with the body, and was dismissed by the King’s order.’

Speaking of the last year of the life of George II., Walpole remarks, with a truth that cannot be gainsaid: ‘It was glorious and triumphant beyond example; and his death was most felicitous to himself, being without a pang, without tasting a reverse, and when his sight and hearing were so nearly extinguished that any prolongation could but have swelled to calamities.’