But the Queen had other business this year wherewith to occupy her besides royal marriages, or filial indispositions. In some of these matters her sincerity is sadly called in question. Here is an instance.
In 1734 the Bishop of Winchester was stricken with apoplexy, and Lord Hervey was no sooner aware of that significant fact—it was a mortal attack—than he wrote to Hoadly at Salisbury, urging him in the strongest terms to make application to be promoted from Sarum to the almost vacant see.
This promotion had been promised him by the King, Queen, and Walpole, all of whom joined in blandly reproving the bishop for being silent when Durham was vacant, whereby alone he lost that golden appointment. He had served government so well, and yet had contrived to maintain most of his usual popularity with the public, that he had been told to look upon Winchester as his own, whenever an opening occurred.
Hoadly was simple enough to believe that the Queen and Walpole were really sincere. He addressed a letter to the King through his ‘two ears’—the Queen and Walpole; and he wrote as if he were sure of being promoted, according to engagement, while at the same time he acted as if he were sure of nothing.
Caroline called the bishop’s letter indelicate, hasty, ill-timed, and such like; but Hoadly so well obeyed the instructions given to him that there was no room for escape, and he received the appointment. When he went to kiss hands upon his elevation, the King was the only one who behaved with common honesty. He, and Caroline too, disliked the man, whom the latter affected a delight to honour, for the reason that his respect for royalty was not so great as to blind him to popular rights, which he supported with much earnestness. On his reception by the King, the latter treated him with disgraceful incivility, exactly in accordance with his feelings. Caroline did violence to hers, and gave him honeyed words, and showered congratulations upon him, and pelted him, as it were, with compliments and candied courtesy. As for Sir Robert Walpole, who hated Hoadly as much as his royal mistress and her consort did together, he took the new Bishop of Winchester aside, and, warmly pressing his hand, assured him without a blush that his translation from Sarum to Winchester was entirely owing to the mediation of himself, Sir Robert. It was a daring assertion, and Sir Robert would have hardly ventured upon making it had he known the share Lord Hervey had had in this little ecclesiastical intrigue. Hoadly was not deluded by Walpole, but he was the perfect dupe of the Queen.
Lord Mahon,[16] in speaking of Caroline, says that ‘her character was without a blemish.’ Compared with many around her, perhaps it was; but if the face had not spots it had ‘patches,’ which looked very much like them. On this matter, the noble lord appears to admit that some doubt may exist, and he subsequently adds: ‘But no doubt can exist as to her discerning and most praiseworthy patronage of worth and learning in the Church. The most able and pious men were everywhere sought and preferred, and the episcopal bench was graced by such men as Hare, Sherlock, and Butler.’ Of course, Queen Caroline’s dislike of Hoadly may be set down as founded upon that prelate’s alleged want of orthodoxy. It has been noticed in another page, that, according to Walpole, the Queen had rather weakened than enlightened her faith by her study of divinity, and that her Majesty herself ‘was at best not orthodox.’ Her countenance of the ‘less-believing’ clergy is said, upon the same authority, to have been the effect of the influence of Lady Sundon, who ‘espoused the heterodox clergy.’
Lord Mahon also says that the Queen was distinguished for charity towards those whom she accounted her enemies. She could nurse her rage, however, a good while to keep it warm. Witness her feeling manifested against that daughter of Lord Portland who married Mr. Godolphin. Her hatred of this lady was irreconcileable, nor was the King’s of a more Christian quality. That lady’s sole offence, however, was her acceptance of the office ‘of governess to their daughter in the late reign, without their consent, at the time they had been turned out of St. James’s, and the education of their children, who were kept there, taken from them.’[17] For this offence the King and Queen were very unwilling to confer a peerage and pension on Godolphin in 1735, when he resigned his office of groom of the stole in the royal household. The peerage and pension were, nevertheless, ultimately conferred at the earnest solicitation of Walpole, and with great ill-humour on the part of the King.
Even Walpole, with all his power and influence, was not at this time so powerful and influential but that when he was crossed in parliament he suffered for it at court. Thus, when the Crown lost several supporters in the house by adverse decisions on election petitions, the King was annoyed, and the Queen gave expression to her own anger on the occasion. It was rare indeed that she ever spoke her dissatisfaction of Sir Robert; but on the occasion in question she is reported as having said that Sir Robert Walpole either neglected these things, and judged it enough to think they were trifles, though in government, and especially in this country, nothing was a trifle, ‘or, perhaps,’ she said, ‘there is some mismanagement I know nothing of, or some circumstances we are none of us acquainted with; but, whatever it is, to me these things seem very ill-conducted.’[18]
The Queen really thought that Walpole was on the point of having outlived his ability and his powers to apply it for the benefit of herself and husband. She observed him melancholy, and set it down that he was mourning over his own difficulties and failures. When Caroline, however, was told that Sir Robert was not in sorrow because of the difficulties of government, but simply because his mistress, Miss Skerret, was dangerously ill of a pleuritic fever, the ‘unblemished Queen’ was glad! She rejoiced that politics had nothing to do with his grief, and she was extremely well pleased to find that the prime-minister was as immoral as men of greater and less dignity. And then she took to satirising both the prime-minister and the lady of his homage. She laughed at him for believing in the attachment of a woman whose motives must be mercenary, and who could not possibly see any attraction in such a man but through the meshes of his purse. ‘She must be a clever gentlewoman,’ said Caroline, ‘to have made him believe that she cares for him on any other score; and to show you what fools we all are on some point or other, she has certainly told him some fine story or other of her love, and her passion, and that poor man, with his burly body, swollen legs, and villainous stomach (“avec ce gros corps, jambes enflés, et ce vilain ventre”) believes her!—ah, what is human nature?’ On this rhapsody Lord Hervey makes a comment in the spirit of Burns’ verse—
Would but some god the giftie gi’e us,