After the ceremony their Majesties occupied two state chairs on the same side of the altar, under a canopy. The mother of the monarch occupied a similar chair of state on the opposite side; the other members of the royal family were seated on stools, while benches were given to the foreign ministers to rest upon. At half-past ten the proceedings came to a close, and the return of the marriage procession from the chapel was announced by thundering salutes from the artillery of the park and the Tower. ‘Can it be possible,’ said the humble bride, ‘that I am worthy of such honours?’
Walpole says of the royal bride that she did nothing but with good humour and cheerfulness. ‘She talks a good deal,’ says the same writer, ‘is easy, civil, and not disconcerted.’ While the august company waited for supper, she sat down, sung, and played; conversed with the King, Duke of Cumberland, and Duke of York, in German and French. She was reported to have been as conversant with the last as any native, but Walpole only says of it that ‘her French is tolerable.’ The supper was in fact a banquet of great splendour and corresponding weariness. ‘They did not get to bed till two;’ by which time the bride, who had made a weary journey through the heat and dust, and had been awake since the dawn, must have been sadly jaded. ‘Nothing but a German constitution,’ said Mrs. Scott, ‘could have undergone it.’ The same lady says:—‘She did not arrive in London till three o’clock, and besides the fatigue of the journey, with the consequences of the flutter she could not avoid being in, she was to dress for her wedding, be married, have a drawing-room, and undergo the ceremony of receiving company after she and the King were in bed, and all the night after her journey and so long a voyage.’ There are no old fashioned nuptial ceremonies to record and to smile at. Walpole alludes to a civil war and campaign on the question of the bedchamber. ‘Everybody is excluded but the minister; even the lords of the bedchamber, cabinet councillors, and foreign ministers; but it has given such offence that I don’t know whether Lord Huntingdon must not be the scapegoat.’
On the 9th of September the Queen held her first drawing-room. ‘Everybody was presented to her, but she spoke to nobody, as she could not know a soul. The crowd was much less than at a birthday; the magnificence very little more. The King looked very handsome, and talked to her with great good humour. It does not promise as if these two would be the two most unhappy persons in England from this event.’
In contrast with this account of an eye-witness stands the deposition of Lady Anne Hamilton, a passage from whose suppressed book may be cited rather than credited. It reflects, however, much of the popular opinion of that and a far later period. ‘In the meantime,’ writes the lady just named, ‘the Earl of Abercorn informed the princess of the previous marriage of the King, and of the existence of his Majesty’s wife; and Lord Hardwicke advised the princess to well inform herself of the policy of the kingdom, as a measure for preventing much future disturbance in the country, as well as securing an uninterrupted possession of the throne to her issue. Presuming, therefore, that the German princess had hitherto been an open and ingenuous character, such expositions, intimations, and dark mysteries were ill-calculated to nourish honourable feelings, but would rather operate as a check to their further existence. To the public eye the newly married pair were contented with each other; alas! it was because each feared an exposure to the nation. The King reproached himself that he had not fearlessly avowed the only wife of his affections; the Queen, because she feared an explanation that the King was guilty of bigamy, and thereby her claim, as also that of her progeny (if she should have any), would be known to be illegitimate. It appears as if the result of those reflections formed a basis for the misery of millions, and added to that number millions yet unborn.’
This probably is solemn nonsense, as it is certainly indifferent English. We get back to comic truth, at least, in an anecdote told by Cumberland, of Bubb Dodington, who, ‘when he paid his court at St. James’s to her Majesty, upon her nuptials, approached to kiss her hand, decked in an embroidered suit of silk, with lilac waistcoat and breeches, the latter of which, in the act of kneeling down, forgot their duty, and broke loose from their moorings in a very indecorous and uncourtly manner.’ As for the forsaken Ariadne, Lady Sarah Lennox was very soon united to Sir Charles Bunbury; and subsequently to Colonel George Napier, by whom she became mother of ‘the Napiers’, one of whom used to speak sneeringly of George IV. as his ‘cousin.’ Lady Sarah’s old royal lover never made any secret of his admiration of her. The last time he was ever at the play with Queen Charlotte, he remarked to her, of one of the most accomplished of actresses, ‘Miss Pope is still like Lady Sarah!’
Between the wedding drawing-room and the coronation the King and Queen appeared twice in public, once at their devotions and once at the play. On both occasions there were crowds of followers, and some disappointment. At the chapel-royal, the preacher, the Rev. Mr. Schultz, made no allusion to the august couple, but simply confined himself to a practical illustration of his text, ‘Provide things honest in the sight of all men.’ It was a text from the application of which a young sovereign couple might learn much that was valuable, without being preached at. But the crowd, who went to stare, and not to pray, would have been better pleased to have heard them lectured, and to have seen how they looked under the infliction. The King had expressly forbidden all laudation of himself from the pulpit, but the Rev. Dr. Wilson, and Mason the poet, disobeyed the injunction, and, getting nothing by their praise, joined the patriotic side in politics immediately. At the play, to which the King and Queen went on the day after attending church, to witness Garrick, who was advertised to play Bayes, in the ‘Rehearsal,’ the King was in roars of laughter at Garrick’s comic acting; which even made the Queen smile, to whom, however, such a play as the ‘Rehearsal’ and such a part as Bayes must have been totally incomprehensible, and defying explanation. No royal state was displayed on this occasion, but there were the penalties which are sometimes paid by a too eager curiosity. The way from the palace to the theatre was so beset by a violently loyal mob that there was difficulty in getting the royal chairs through the unwelcome pressure. The accidents were many, and some were fatal. The young married couple did not accomplish their first party of pleasure, shared with the public, but at the expense of three or four lives of persons trampled to death among the crowd that had assembled to view their portion of the sight.
The St. ‘James’s Chronicle’ thus reports the scene which took place on the occasion of the royal visit to Drury Lane, on Friday, the 11th of September: ‘Last night, about a quarter after six, their Majesties the King and Queen, with most of the royal family, went to Drury Lane playhouse to see the “Rehearsal.” Their Majesties went in chairs, and the rest of the royal family in coaches, attended by the horse-guards. His Majesty was preceded by the Duke of Devonshire, his lord-chamberlain, and the Honourable Mr. Finch, his vice-chamberlain; and her Majesty was preceded by the Duke of Manchester, her lord-chamberlain, and Lord Cantalupe, her vice-chamberlain, the Earl of Harcourt, her master of the horse, and by the Duchess of Ancaster and the Countess of Effingham. It is almost inconceivable, the crowds of people that waited in the streets, quite from St. James’s to the playhouse, to see their Majesties. Never was seen so brilliant a train, the ladies being mostly dressed in the clothes and jewels they wore at the royal marriage. The house was quite full before the doors were open, so that out of the vast multitude that waited the opening of the doors, not a hundred got in; the house being previously filled, to the great disappointment and fatigue of many thousands; and we may venture to say that there were people enough to have filled fifty such houses. There was a prodigious deal of mischief done at the doors of the house; several genteel women, who were imprudent enough to attempt to get in, had their clothes, caps, aprons, handkerchiefs, all torn off them. It is said a girl was killed, and a man so trampled on that there are no hopes of his recovery.’
Among the congratulatory addresses presented to the Queen, on the occasion of her marriage, there was none which caused so much remark as that presented by the ladies of St. Albans. They complained that custom had deprived them of the pleasure of joining in the address presented by the gentlemen of the borough, and that they were therefore compelled to act independently. They profited by the occasion to express a hope that the example set by the King and Queen would be speedily and widely followed. The holy state of matrimony, the St. Albans ladies assured her Majesty, had fallen so low as to be sneered at and disregarded by gentlemen. They further declared that if the best riches of a nation consisted in the amount of population, they were the best citizens who did their utmost to increase that amount: to further which end the ladies of St. Albans expressed a loyal degree of willingness, with sundry logical reasonings which made even the grave Charlotte smile.
It is unnecessary perhaps to enter detailedly upon the programme of the royal coronation. All coronations very much resemble each other; they only vary in some of their incidents. That of George and Charlotte had well-nigh been delayed by the sudden and unexpected strike of the workmen at Westminster Hall. These handicraftsmen had been accustomed to take toll of the public admitted to see the preparations; but soldiers on guard, perceiving the profit to be derived from such a course, allowed no one to enter at all but after payment of an admission fee sufficiently large to gratify their cupidity. The plunderers of the public thereupon fell out, and the workmen struck because they had been deprived of an opportunity of robbing curious citizens. The dispute was settled by a compromise; an increase of wages was made to the workmen, and the military continued to levy with great success upon the purses of civilians, as before.
Nothing further remained to impede the completion of the preparations for the spectacle; but by another strike, a portion, at least, of the public ran the risk of not seeing the spectacle at all. The chairmen and drivers of hired vehicles had talked so largely of their scale of prices for the Coronation Day, that the authorities threatened to interfere and establish a tariff; whereupon the chairmen and their brethren solemnly announced that not a hired vehicle of any description should ply in the streets at all on the day in question; and that if there were a sight worth seeing, the full-dressed public might get to it how they could: they should not ride to it. Thereupon, great was the despair of a very large and interested class. Appeals, almost affectionate in expression, were made to the offended chairmen who led the revolt, and they were entreated to trust to the generous feelings of their patrons, willing to be their very humble servants, for one day. The amiable creatures at last yielded, when it was perfectly understood that the liberal sentiment of riders was to be computed at the rate of a guinea for a ride from the West-end to the point nearest the Abbey which the chairmen could reach. Not many could penetrate beyond Charing Cross, where the bewildered fares were set down amid the mob and the mud, to work their way through both as best they might.