This service of genuflexion remained in courtly fashion till the death of Queen Charlotte. In the mean time, Mrs. Howard was by no means disposed to render it to Queen Caroline. The scene which ensued was highly amusing. On the service being demanded, said Caroline to Lord Hervey, ‘Mrs. Howard proceeded to tell me, with her little fierce eyes, and cheeks as red as your coat, that, positively, she would not do it; to which I made her no answer then in anger, but calmly, as I would have said to a naughty child:—“Yes, my dear Howard, I am sure you will. I know you will. Go, go; fie for shame! Go, my good Howard; we will talk of this another time.” Mrs. Howard did come round; and I told her,’ said Caroline, ‘I knew we should be good friends again; but could not help adding, in a little more serious voice, that I owned, of all my servants, I had least expected, as I had least deserved it, such treatment from her; when she knew I had held her up at a time when it was in my power, if I had pleased, any hour of the day, to let her drop through my fingers, thus——.’
Caroline’s own account of the fracas between Mrs. Howard and her husband is too characteristic to be passed over. The curious in such matters will find it in full detail in ‘Lord Hervey’s Memoirs.’ In this place it will suffice to say, that, according to Lord Hervey, Mr. Howard had a personal interview with the Queen. Caroline described the circumstances of it with great graphic power. At this interview he had said that he would take his wife out of her Majesty’s coach if he met her in it. Caroline told him to ‘Do it, if he dare; though,’ she added, ‘I was horribly afraid of him (for we were tête à tête) all the time I was thus playing the bully. What added to my fear on this occasion,’ said the Queen, ‘was, that as I knew him to be so brutal, as well as a little mad, and seldom quite sober, so that I did not think it impossible but that he might throw me out of window (for it was in this very room our interview was, and that sash then open, as it is now); but as soon as I got near the door, and thought myself safe from being thrown out of the window, I resumed my grand tone of Queen, and said I would be glad to see who would dare to open my coach-door and take out one of my servants; knowing all the time that he might do so if he would, and that he could have his wife and I the affront. Then I told him that my resolution was positively, neither to force his wife to go to him if she had no mind to it, nor to keep her if she had. He then said he would complain to the King; upon which I again assumed my high tone, and said the King had nothing to do with my servants; and, for that reason, he might save himself the trouble, as I was sure the King would give him no answer but that it was none of his business to concern himself with my family; and after a good deal more conversation of this sort (I standing close to the door all the while to give me courage), Mr. Howard and I bade one another good morning, and he withdrew.’
Caroline proceeded to call Lord Trevor ‘an old fool’ for coming to her with thanks from Mrs. Howard, and suggestions that the Queen should give 1,200l. a-year to the husband for the consent of the latter to his wife’s being retained in the Queen’s household. Caroline replied to this suggestion with as high a tone as she could have used when addressing herself to Mr. Howard; but with a coarseness of spirit and sentiment which hardly became a queen, although they do not appear to have been considered unbecoming in a queen at that time. ‘I thought,’ said Caroline, ‘I had done full enough, and that it was a little too much, not only to keep the King’s “guenipes” (trollops) under my roof, but to pay them too. I pleaded poverty to my good Lord Trevor, and said I would do anything to keep so good a servant as Mrs. Howard about me; but that for the 1,200l. a-year, I really could not afford it.’ The King used to make presents to the Queen of fine Hanoverian horses, not that she might be gratified, but that he might, when he wanted them, have horses maintained out of her purse. So he gave her a bedchamber-woman in Mrs. Howard; but Caroline would not have her on the same terms as the horses, and the 1,200l. a-year were probably paid—-not by the King, after all, but by the people.
Lord Chesterfield describes the figure of Mrs. Howard as being above the middle size and well-shaped, with a face more pleasing than beautiful.[7] She was remarkable for the extreme fairness and fineness of her hair. ‘Her arms were square and lean, that is, ugly. Her countenance was an undecided one, and announced neither good nor ill nature, neither sense nor the want of it, neither vivacity nor dulness.’ It is difficult to understand how such a face could be ‘pleasing;’ and the following is the characteristic of a common-place person. ‘She had good natural sense, not without art, but in her conversation dwelt tediously upon details and minuties.’ Of the man whom she had, when very young, hastily married for love, and heartily hated at leisure, Chesterfield says, ‘he was sour, dull, and sullen.’ The same writer sets it down as equally unaccountable that the lady should have loved such a man, or that the man should ever have loved anybody. The noble lord is also of opinion that only a Platonic friendship reigned between the King and the favourite; and that it was as innocent as that which was said to have existed between himself and Miss Bellenden.
Very early during the intercourse, ‘the busy and speculative politicians of the antechambers, who knew everything, but knew everything wrong,’ imagined that the lady’s influence must be all-powerful, seeing that her admirer paid to her the homage of devoting to her the best hours of his day. She did not reject solicitations, we are told, because she was unwilling to have it supposed that she was without power. She neither rejected solicitations nor bound herself by promises, but hinted at difficulties; and, in short, as Chesterfield well expresses it, she used ‘all that trite cant of those who with power will not, and of those who without power cannot, grant the requested favours.’ So far from being able to make peers, she was not even successful in a well-meant attempt to procure a place of 200l. a-year ‘for John Gay, a very poor and honest man, and no bad poet, only because he was a poet, which the King considered as a mechanic.’ Mrs. Howard had little influence, either in the house of the Prince, or, when she became Countess of Suffolk, in that of the King. Caroline, we are told, ‘had taken good care that Lady Suffolk’s apartment should not lead to power and favour; and from time to time made her feel her inferiority by hindering the King from going to her room for three or four days, representing it as the seat of a political faction.’
CHAPTER III.
THE MARRIAGE OF THE PRINCESS ANNE.
Violent opposition to the King by Prince Frederick—Readings at Windsor Castle—The Queen’s patronage of Stephen Duck—His melancholy end—Glance at passing events—Precipitate flight of Dr. Nichols—Princess Anne’s determination to get a husband—Louis XV. proposed as a suitor; negotiation broken off—The Prince of Orange’s offer accepted—Ugly and deformed—The King and Queen averse to the union—Dowry settled on the Princess—Anecdote of the Duchess of Marlborough—Illness of the bridegroom—Ceremonies attendant on the marriage—Mortification of the Queen—The public nuptial chamber—Offence given to the Irish peers—The Queen and Lady Suffolk—Homage paid by the Princess to her deformed husband—Discontent of Prince Frederick—His anxiety not unnatural—Congratulatory addresses by the Lords and Commons—Spirited conduct of the Queen—Lord Chesterfield—Agitations on Walpole’s celebrated Excise Scheme—Lord Stair delegated to remonstrate with the Queen—Awkward performance of his mission—Sharply rebuked by the Queen—Details of the interview—The Queen’s success in overcoming the King’s antipathy to Walpole—Comments of the populace—Royal interview with a bishop.
The social happiness of Caroline began now to be affected by the conduct of her son Frederick, Prince of Wales. Since his arrival in England, in 1728, he had been but coolly entertained by his parents, who refused to pay the debts he had accumulated in Hanover previous to his leaving the Electorate. He was soon in the arms of the opposition; and the court had no more violent an enemy, political or personal, than this prince.
His conduct, however—and some portion of it was far from being unprovoked—did not prevent the court from entering into some social enjoyments of a harmless and not over-amusing nature. Among these may be reckoned the ‘readings’ at Windsor Castle. These readings consisted of the poetry, or verses rather, of that Stephen Duck, the thresher, whose rhymes Swift has ridiculed in lines as weak as any which ever fell from the pen of Duck. The latter was a Wiltshire labourer, who supported, or tried to support, a family upon the modest wages of four-and-sixpence a week. In his leisure hours, whenever those could have occurred, he cultivated poetry; and two of his pieces, ‘The Shunamite’ and ‘The Thresher’s Labour,’ were publicly read in the drawing-room at Windsor Castle, in 1730, by Lord Macclesfield. Caroline procured for the poet the office of yeoman of the guard, and afterwards made him keeper of her grotto, Merlin’s Cave, at Richmond. This last act, and the patronage and pounds which Caroline wasted upon the wayward and worthless savage, show that Swift’s epigram upon the busts in the hermitage at Richmond was not based upon truth—
Louis, the living learned fed,