and George might have silently assented to the reply of Cibber, Jun., in ‘Messala,’ that—
On crowns they trample with superior pride;
They haughtily affect the pomp of princes.
The Queen’s vice-chamberlain asserts that the King’s heart still beat for Caroline as warmly as his temper did against her. This assertion is not proved, but the contrary, by the facts. These facts were of so painful a nature to the Queen that she did not like to speak of them, even to Sir Robert Walpole. One of them is a precious instance of the conjugal warmth of heart pledged for by Lord Hervey.
The night before the King had last left Hanover for England he supped gaily, in company with Madame Walmoden and her friends, who were not so nice as to think that the woman who had deserted her husband for a King who betrayed his consort had at all lost caste by such conduct. Towards the close of the banquet, the frail lady, all wreathed in mingled tears and smiles, rose, and gave as a toast, or sentiment, the ‘next 29th of May.’ On that day the old libertine had promised to be again at the feet of his new concubine; and as this was known to the select and delicate company, they drank the ‘toast’ amid shouts of loyalty and congratulations.
The knowledge of this fact gave more pain to Caroline than all the royal fits of ill-humour together. The pain was increased by the King’s conduct at home. It had been his custom of a morning, at St. James’s, to tarry in the Queen’s rooms until after he had, from behind the blinds, seen the guard relieved in the court-yard below: this took place about eleven o’clock. This year he ceased to visit the Queen or to watch the soldiers; but by nine o’clock in the morning he was seated at his desk, writing lengthy epistles to Madame Walmoden, in reply to the equally long letters from the lady, who received and despatched a missive every post.
‘He wants to go to Hanover, does he?’ asked Sir Robert Walpole of Lord Hervey; ‘and to be there by the 29th of May. Well, he shan’t go for all that.’
Domestic griefs could not depress the Queen’s wit. An illustration of this is afforded by her remark on the Triple Alliance. ‘It always put her in mind,’ she said, ‘of the South Sea scheme, which the parties concerned entered into, not without knowing the cheat, but hoping to make advantage of it, everybody designing, when he had made his own fortune, to be the first in scrambling out of it, and each thinking himself wise enough to be able to leave his fellow-adventurers in the lurch.’
It has been well observed that the King’s good humour was now as insulting to her Majesty as his bad. When he was in the former rare vein, he exhibited it by entertaining the Queen with accounts of her rival, and the many pleasures which he and that lady had enjoyed together. He appears at Hanover to have been as extravagant in the entertainments which he gave as his grandfather, Ernest Augustus. Some of these court revels he caused to be painted on canvas; the ladies represented therein were all portraits of the actual revellers. Several of such pictures were brought over to England, and five of them were hung up in the Queen’s dressing-room. Occasionally, of an evening, the King would take a candle from the Queen’s table, and go from picture to picture, with Lord Hervey, telling him its history, explaining the joyous incidents, naming the persons represented, and detailing all that had been said or done on the particular occasion before them. ‘During which lecture,’ says the vice-chamberlain himself, ‘Lord Hervey, while peeping over his Majesty’s shoulders at those pictures, was shrugging up his own, and now and then stealing a look, to make faces at the Queen, who, a little angry, a little peevish, and a little tired at her husband’s absurdity, and a little entertained with his lordship’s grimaces, used to sit and knot in a corner of the room, sometimes yawning, and sometimes smiling, and equally afraid of betraying those signs, either of her lassitude or mirth.’
In the course of the year which we have now reached, Queen Caroline communicated to Lord Hervey a fact, which is not so much evidence of her Majesty’s common-sense, as of the presumption and immorality of those who gave Caroline little credit for having even the sense which is so qualified. Lord Bolingbroke had married the Marchioness de Villette, niece of Madame de Maintenon, about the year 1716. The union, however, was not only kept secret for many years, but when Bolingbroke was under attainder, and a sum of 52,000l. belonging to his wife was in the hands of Decker, the banker, Lady Bolingbroke swore that she was not married to him, and so obtained possession of a sum which, being hers, was her husband’s, and which being her husband’s, who was attainted as a traitor, was forfeit to the Crown. However, as some of it went through the hands of poor Sophia Dorothea’s rival, the easy Duchess of Kendal, and her rapacious niece, Lady Walsingham, the matter was not enquired into. Subsequently Lady Bolingbroke attempted to excuse her husband’s alleged dealings with the Pretender, by asserting that he entered into them solely for the purpose of serving the Court of London. ‘That was, in short,’ said Caroline to Lord Hervey, ‘to betray the Pretender; for though Madame de Villette softened the word, she did not soften the thing, which I own,’ continued the Queen, ‘was a speech which had so much impudence and villainy mixed up in it, that I could never bear him or her from that hour, and could hardly hinder myself from saying to her—“And pray, madam, what security can the King have that my Lord Bolingbroke does not desire to come here with the same honest desire that he went to Rome? or that he swears that he is no longer a Jacobite, with any more truth than you have sworn you are not his wife?”’ The only wonder is, considering Caroline’s vivacious character, that she restrained herself from giving expression to her thoughts. She was eminently fond of ‘speaking daggers’ to those who merited such a gladiatorial visitation.