This time he returned to his ‘old’ wife laden with a fresh sorrow—the memory of a new favourite. He had left his heart with the insinuating Walmoden, and he brought to his superb Caroline nothing but a tribute of ill-humour and spite. He hated more than ever the change from an Electorate where he was so delightfully despotic, to a country where he was only chief magistrate, and where the people, through their representatives, kept a very sharp watch upon him in the execution of his duties. He was accordingly as coarse and evil-disposed towards the circle of his court as he was to her who was the centre of it. He, too, was like one of those pantomime potentates who are for ever in King Cambyses’ vein, and who sweep through the scene in a whirlwind of farcically furious words and of violent acts, or of threats almost as bad as if the menaces had been actually realised. It was observed that his behaviour to Caroline had never been so little tinged with outward respect as now. She bore his ill-humour with admirable patience; and her quiet endurance only the more provoked the petulance of the little and worthless King.
He was not only ill-tempered with the mistress of the palace, but was made, or chose to think himself, especially angry at trifling improvements which Caroline had carried into effect in the suburban palace during the temporary absence of its master. The improvements consisted chiefly in removing some worthless pictures and indifferent statues and placing master-pieces in their stead. The King would have all restored to the condition it was in when he had last left the palace; and he treated Lord Hervey as a fool for venturing to defend the Queen’s taste and the changes which had followed the exercise of it. ‘I suppose,’ said the dignified King to the courteous vice-chamberlain, ‘I suppose you assisted the Queen with your fine advice when she was pulling my house to pieces, and spoiling all my furniture. Thank God! at least she has left the walls standing!’
Lord Hervey asked if he would not allow the two Vandykes which the Queen had substituted for ‘two signposts,’ to remain. George pettishly answered, that he didn’t care whether they were changed or no; ‘but,’ he added, ‘for the picture with the dirty frame over the door, and the three nasty little children, I will have them taken away, and the old ones restored. I will have it done, too, to-morrow morning, before I go to London, or else I know it will not be done at all.’
Lord Hervey next enquired if his Majesty would also have ‘his gigantic fat Venus restored too?’ The King replied that he would, for he liked his fat Venus better than anything which had been put in its place. Upon this Lord Hervey says he fell to thinking ‘that if his Majesty had liked his fat Venus as well as he used to do, there would have been none of these disputations.’
By a night’s calm repose the ill-humour of the Sovereign was not dispersed. On the following morning we meet with the insufferable little man in the gallery, where the Queen and her daughters were taking chocolate; her son, the Duke of Cumberland, standing by. He only stayed five minutes, but in that short time the husband and father contrived to wound the feelings of his wife and children. ‘He snubbed the Queen, who was drinking chocolate, for being always stuffing; the Princess Amelia for not hearing him; the Princess Caroline for being grown fat; the Duke of Cumberland for standing awkwardly; and then he carried the Queen out to walk, to be re-snubbed in the garden.’[21]
Sir Robert Walpole told his friend Hervey that he had done his utmost to prepare the Queen for this change in the King’s feelings and actions towards her. He reminded her that her personal attractions were not what they had been, and he counselled her to depend more upon her intellectual superiority than ever. The virtuous man advised her to secure the good temper of the King by throwing certain ladies in his way of an evening. Sir Robert mentioned, among others, Lady Tankerville, ‘a very safe fool, who would give the King some amusement without giving her Majesty any trouble.’ Lady Deloraine, the Delia from whose rage Pope bade his readers dread slander and poison, had already attracted the royal notice, and the King liked to play cards with her in his daughter’s apartments. This lady, who had the loosest tongue of the least modest women about the court, was characterised by Walpole as likely to exercise a dangerous influence over the King. If Caroline would retain her power, he insinuated, she must select her husband’s favourites, through whom she might still reign supreme.
Caroline is said to have taken this advice in good part. There would be difficulty in believing that it ever was given did we not know that the Queen herself could joke, not very delicately, in full court, on her position as a woman not first in her husband’s regard. Sir Robert would comment on these jokes in the same locality, and with increase of coarseness. The Queen, however, though she affected to laugh, was both hurt and displeased—hurt by the joke and displeased with the joker, of whom Swift has said, that—
By favour and fortune fastidiously blest,
He was loud in his laugh and was coarse in his jest.
In spite of the King’s increased ill-temper towards the Queen, and in spite of what Sir Robert Walpole thought and said upon that delicate subject, Lord Hervey maintains that at this very time the King’s heart, as affected towards the Queen, was not less warm than his temper. The facts which are detailed by the gentle official immediately after he has made this assertion go strongly to disprove the latter. The detail involves a rather long extract; but its interest, and the elaborate minuteness with which this picture of a royal interior is painted, will doubtless be considered ample excuse for reproducing the passages. Lord Hervey was eye and ear-witness of what he here so well describes:—