Lord Hervey was the master of the ceremonies on this serio-comic occasion. According to his table of precedence, the Irish peers were to walk in the procession after the entire body of the peerage of Great Britain. This was putting the highest Irish peer beneath the lowest baron in Britain. The Hibernian lords claimed to walk immediately after the English and Scotch peers of their own degree. It was the most modest claim ever made by that august body; but, modest as it was, the arrogant peers of Great Britain threatened, if the claim were allowed, to absent themselves from the ceremony altogether! The case was represented to Caroline, and she took the side of right and common sense; but when she was told that to allow the Irish claim would be to banish every British peer from the solemn ceremony, she was weak enough to give way. Lord Hervey, in his programme for the occasion, omitted to make any mention of the peers of Ireland at all—thus leaving them to walk where they could. On being remonstrated with, he said that if the Irish lords were not satisfied he would keep all the finery standing, and they might walk through it in any order of precedency they liked on the day after the wedding. One lord grievously complained of the omission of the illustrious Hibernian body from the programme. Lord Hervey excused himself by remarking, that as the Irish house of peers was then sitting in Dublin, he never thought, being an Englishman, of the august members of that assembly being in two places at once.
The claim was probably disallowed because Ireland was not then in union with England, as Scotland was. On no other ground could the claim have been refused; and Caroline saw that even that ground was not a very good one whereon to rest a denial. As it was, the Irish peers felt like poor relations, neither invited to nor prohibited from the joyous doings, but with a thorough conviction that, to use a popular phrase, their room was deemed preferable to their company.
During the week following the marriage, Frederick, Prince of Wales, was employed, after a fashion which suited his tastes extremely well, in escorting his brother-in-law to witness the sights of London. It then appears to have suddenly struck the government that it would be as well to make an Englishman of the bridegroom, and that that consummation could not be too quickly arrived at. Accordingly, a bill for naturalising the prince was brought in and read three times on the same day. It, of course, passed unanimously, and the prince received the intelligence of his having been converted into a Briton with a phlegm which showed that he had not altogether ceased to be a Dutchman.
He was much more pleasurably excited in the April of the following year, when he heard that the King had sent a written message to the Commons, intimating that he had settled five thousand a year on the princess royal, and desiring that they would enable him to make the grant for the life of the princess, as it would otherwise determine on his Majesty’s death. The Commons complied with this message, and the Prince of Orange was infinitely more delighted with this Act than with that which bestowed on him the legal rights of an Englishman.
This pleasant little arrangement having been concluded, the prince and princess set out for Holland, from St. James’s, on the 10th of April 1734; and in July of the same year the princess was again in England, not at all to the satisfaction of her sire, and but very scantily to the delight of her mother. The young lady, however, was determined to remain; and it was not till November that she once more returned to her home behind the dykes. The Queen was not sorry to part with her, for just then she was deep in the fracas connected with the dismissal of her husband’s ‘favourite,’ Lady Suffolk, from her office of mistress of the robes to her Majesty, an office in which she was succeeded by the more worthy Countess of Tankerville. The King had the less time to be troubled with thought about ‘that old deaf woman,’ as he very ungallantly used to call his ancient ‘favourite,’ as he, too, was deeply engaged in protesting against the Elector Palatine, who had been very vigorously protesting against the right of the King, as Elector of Hanover, to bear the title of arch-treasurer of the empire.
The commiseration which the Queen had felt for her daughter was shared by the sister of the latter, the Princess Amelia, who declared that nothing on earth could have induced her to wed with such a man as the Prince of Orange. Her declaration was accepted for as much as it was worth. The gentle Princess Caroline, on the other hand, thought that her sister, under the circumstances, had acted wisely, and that, had she been so placed, she would have acted in like manner. Nor did the conduct of the bride give the world any reason to think that she stood in need of pity. She appeared to adore the ‘monster,’ who, it must be confessed, exhibited no particular regard for his spouse. The homage she paid him was perfect. ‘She made prodigious court to him,’ says Lord Hervey, ‘addressed everything she said to him, and applauded everything he said to anybody else.’
Perhaps the pride of the princess would not permit a doubt to be thrown upon her supreme happiness. Her brother Frederick strove to mar it by raising a quarrel, on a slight, but immensely absurd, foundation. He reproached her for the double fault of presuming to be married before him, and of accepting a settlement from her father when he had none. He was ingenious in finding fault; but there may have been a touch of satire in this, for Anne was known to have been as groundlessly angry with her brother for a circumstance which he could not very well help, namely, his own birth, whereby the princess royal ceased to be next heir to the crown.
The prince, however, was not much addicted to showing respect to anybody, least of all to his mother. It was because of this miserable want of respect for the Queen that the King, in an interview forced on him by his son, refused to settle a fixed annuity upon him—at least till he had manifested a more praiseworthy conduct towards the Queen.
The anxiety of Frederick on this occasion was not unnatural, for he was deeply in debt, and of the 100,000l. granted to the prince by parliament out of the civil list, the King allowed him only 36,000l. The remainder was appropriated by the King, who doubtless made his son’s conduct the rule of his liberality, measuring his supplies to the prince according as the latter was well or ill behaved. It was a degrading position enough, and the degradation was heightened by the silent contempt with which the King passed over his son’s application to be permitted to join in active service. Throughout these first family quarrels, the Queen preserved a great impartiality, with some leaning, perhaps, towards serving her son. Nothing, however, came of it; and, for the moment, Frederick was fain to be content with doing the honours of the metropolis to his ungraceful brother-in-law.
The congratulatory addresses which were presented on the occasion of the marriage had a mordantly satirical tone about them. It is wonderful how George and Caroline, whose unpopularity was increasing at this time, continued to preserve their equanimity at hearing praises rung on the name and services of ‘Orange’—the name of a prince who had become King of England by rendering the questionable service to his father-in-law of turning him off the throne.