To return to the domestic affairs of Caroline: it is to be observed that the Queen had not seen the King leave England, with indifference. She was aware that he was chiefly attracted to Hanover by the unblushing rival who, on his departure thence, had drunk, amid smiles and tears, to his speedy return. His departure, therefore, something affected her proud spirit, and she was for a season depressed. But business acted upon her as a tonic, and she was occupied and happy, yet not without her hours of trial and vexation, until the time approached for the King’s return.
Bitter, however, were her feelings when she found that return protracted beyond the usual period. For the King to be absent on his birthday was a most unusual occurrence, and Caroline felt that the rival must have some power indeed who could thus restrain him from indulgence in old habits. She was, however, as proud as she was pained. She began to grow cool in her ceremony and attentions to the King. She abridged the ordinary length of her letters to him, and the usual four dozen pages were shortened into some seven or eight. Her immediate friends, who were aware of this circumstance, saw at once that her well-known judgment and prudence were now in default. They knew that to attempt to insinuate reproach to the King would arouse his anger, and not awaken his sleeping tenderness. They feared lest her power over him should become altogether extinct, and that his Majesty would soon as little regard his wife by force of habit as he had long ceased to do by readiness of inclination. It was Walpole’s conviction that the King’s respect for her was too firmly based to be ever shaken. Faithless himself, he reverenced the fidelity and sincerity which he knew were in her; and if she could not rule by the heart, it was certain that she might still continue supreme by the head—by her superior intellect. Still, the minister recognised the delicacy and danger of the moment, and, in an interview with Caroline, he made it the subject of as extraordinary a discussion as was ever held between minister and royal mistress—between man and woman. Walpole reminded her of faded charms and growing years, and he expatiated on the impossibility of her ever being able to establish supremacy in the King’s regard by power of her personal attractions! It is a trait of her character worth noticing, that she listened to these unwelcome, but almost unwarrantably expressed, truths with immoveable patience. But Walpole did not stop here. He urged her to resume her long letters to the King, and to address him in terms of humility, submissiveness, duty, and tender affection; and he set the climax on what one might almost be authorised to consider his impudence, by recommending her to invite the King to bring Madame Walmoden with him to England. At this counsel the tears did spring into the eyes of Caroline. The softened feeling, however, only maintained itself for a moment. It was soon forgotten in her desire to recover or retain her power. She promised to obey the minister in all he had enjoined upon her; but Walpole, well as he knew her, very excusably conjectured that there must still be enough of the mere woman in her, to induce her to refuse to perform what she had promised to accomplish. He was, however, mistaken. It is true, indeed, that her heart recoiled at what the head had resolved, but she maintained her resolution. She conversed calmly with Walpole on the best means of carrying it out. But the minister put no trust in her assertions until such a letter as he had recommended had actually been despatched by her to the King. She rallied Walpole on his doubts of her, but praised him for his abominable counsel. It was this commendation which alarmed him. He could believe in her reproof; but he affirmed that he was always afraid when Caroline ‘daubed.’ However, he was now obliged to believe, for the Queen spoke calmly of the coming of her rival, allotted rooms for her reception, devised plans and projects for rendering her comfortable, and even expressed her willingness to take her into her own service! Walpole opposed this, but she cited the case of Lady Suffolk. Upon which the minister observed, with infinite moral discrimination, that there was a difference between the King’s making a mistress of the Queen’s servant, and making a Queen’s servant of his mistress. The people might reasonably look upon the first as a very natural condition of things, while the popular virtue might feel itself outraged at the second. Caroline said nothing, but wrote certainly the most singular letter that ever wife wrote to a husband. It was replied to by a letter also the most singular that ever husband addressed to a wife.[27] The King’s epistle was full of admiration at his consort’s amiable conduct, and of descriptions of her rival’s bodily and mental features. He extolled the virtues of his wife, and then expressed a wish that he could be as virtuous as she! ‘But,’ wrote he, in very elegant French, ‘you know my passions, my dear Caroline; you know my weaknesses; there is nothing in my heart hidden from you; and would to God,’ exclaimed the mendacious, blaspheming libertine, ‘would to God that you could correct me with the same facility with which you apprehend me! Would to God that I could imitate you as well as I admire you, and that I could learn of you all the virtues which you make me see, feel, and love!’
The Queen, then, had not only to look after the affairs of the kingdom in the monarch’s absence, but to assist him with her advice for the better management of his love-affairs in Hanover. With all Madame Walmoden’s affected fidelity towards him, he had good grounds for suspecting that his interest in her was shared by less noble rivals. The senile dupe was perplexed in the extreme. One rival named as being on too familiar terms with the lady was a Captain von der Schulenburg, a relation of the Duchess of Kendal. There was a little drama enacted by all three parties, as complicated as a Spanish comedy, and full of love-passages, rope-ladders, and lying. The closing scene exhibits the lady indignant in asserting her innocence, and the wretched monarch too happy to put faith in her assertions. When left alone, however, he addressed a letter to his wife, asking her what she thought of the matter, and requesting her to consult Walpole, as a man ‘who has more experience in these sort of matters, my dear Caroline, than yourself, and who in the present affair must necessarily be less prejudiced than I am!’ There never was an epithet of obloquy which this miserable fellow flung at his fellow men which might not have been more appropriately applied to himself.
Caroline, doubtless, gave the counsel that was expected from her; and then, having settled to the best of her ability this very delicate affair, she was called upon to interfere in a matter more serious. The young Princess of Wales had scandalised the whole royal family by taking the sacrament at the German Lutheran chapel. Serious remonstrance was made to her on the subject; but the young lady shed tears, and pleaded her conscience. Religious liberty, however, was not a thing to be thought of, and she must take the sacrament according to the forms prescribed by the Church of England. She resisted the compulsion, until it was intimated to her that if she persisted in the course on which she had entered, there was a possibility that she might be sent back to Saxe Gotha. Upon that hint she at once joined the Church of England. She had no more hesitation than a Lutheran or Catholic German princess who marries into the Czar’s family has of at once accepting all which the Greek Church enjoins, and which the lady neither cares for nor comprehends.
Nor was this the only church matter connected with the princess which gave trouble to the Queen. The case of conscience was followed by a case of courtesy, or rather, perhaps, of the want of it. The Queen attended divine service regularly in the chapel in Kensington Palace, and set a good example of being early in her attendance, which was not followed by the Prince and Princess of Wales, when they also were in residence at the palace. It was the bad habit of the latter, doubtless at the instigation of her husband, not to enter the chapel till after the service had commenced and the Queen was engaged in her devotions. The princess had then, in order to get to the seat allotted to her, to pass by the Queen—a large woman in a small pew! The scene was unbecoming in the extreme; for the princess passed in front of her Majesty, between her and the prayer-book, and there was much confusion and unseemliness in consequence. When this had been repeated a few times, the Queen ordered Sir William Toby, the princess’s chamberlain, to introduce his royal mistress by another door than that by which the Queen entered, whereby her royal highness might pass to her place without indecorously incommoding her Majesty. The prince would not allow this to be done, and he only so far compromised the matter, by ordering the princess, whenever she found the Queen at chapel before herself, not to enter at all, but to return to the palace.
Caroline, offended as she was with her son, would not allow him to pretend that she was as difficult to live with as his father, and so concealed her anger. Lord Hervey so well knew that the prince wished to render the Queen unpopular, that he counselled his royal mistress not to let her son enjoy a grievance that he could trade upon. Lord Hervey said, ‘he could wish that if the prince was to sit down in her lap, that she would only say she hoped he found it easy.’
For the princess the Queen had nothing but a feeling which partook mostly of a compassionate regard. She knew her to be really harmless, and thought her very dull company; which, for a woman of Caroline’s intellect and power of conversation, she undoubtedly was. The woman of cultivated mind yawned wearily at the truisms of the common-place young lady, and made an assertion with respect to her which bespoke a mind more coarse than cultivated. ‘Poor creature!’ said Caroline, of her young daughter-in-law; ‘were she to spit in my face, I should only pity her for being under such a fool’s direction, and wipe it off.’ The fool, of course, was the speaker’s son. The young wife, it must be confessed, was something childish in her ways. Nothing pleased her better than to play half through the day with a large, jointed doll. This she would dress and undress, and nurse and fondle at the windows of Kensington Palace, to the amusement and wonder, rather than to the edification, of the servants in the palace and the sentinels beneath the windows. The Princess Caroline almost forgot her gentle character in chiding her sister-in-law, and desiring her ‘not to stand at the window during these operations on her baby.’ The Princess Caroline did not found her reproach upon the impropriety of the action, but upon that of allowing it to be witnessed by others. The lower people, she said, thought everything ridiculous that was not customary, and the thing would draw a mob about her, and make la canaille talk disagreeably!
The act showed the childishness of her character at that time; a childishness on which her husband improved by getting her to apply, through the Queen, for the King’s consent to allow her to place Lady Archibald Hamilton upon her household. Frederick informed his young wife of the position in which the world said the lady stood with regard to him; but he assured her that it was all false. Augusta believed, or affected to believe, or was perhaps indifferent; and Lady Archibald was made lady of the bedchamber, privy purse, and mistress of the robes to the princess, with a salary of nine hundred pounds a-year.
While the ladies of the court discussed the subject of the King, his wife, his favourite, and the favourite of the prince, and seriously canvassed the expediency of bringing Madame Walmoden to England, there were some who entertained an idea that it would be well if the Sovereign himself could be kept out of it. The people took to commiserating Caroline, and many censured her husband for his infidelity, while others only reproved him because that faithlessness was made profitable to foreigners and not to fairer frailty at home. In the meantime, his double taste for his Electorate and the ladies there was caricatured in various ways. Pasquinades intimated that his Hanoverian Majesty would condescend to visit his British dominions at a future stated period. A lame, blind, and aged horse, with a saddle, and a pillion behind it, was sent to wander through the streets, with an inscription on the forehead, which begged that nobody would stop him, as he was ‘the King’s Hanoverian equipage, going to fetch his Majesty and his —— to England.’ The most stinging satire of all was boldly affixed to the walls of St. James’s Palace, and was to this effect: ‘Lost or strayed, out of this house, a man who has left a wife and six children on the parish. Whoever will give any tidings of him to the churchwardens of St. James’s parish, so as he may be got again, shall receive four shillings and sixpence reward. N.B. This reward will not be increased, nobody judging him to deserve a crown.’
The King himself was rather gratified than otherwise with satires which imputed to him a gallantry (as it is erroneously called) of disposition. He was only vexed when censure was gravely directed against him which had reference to the incompatibility of his pursuits with his position, his age, and his infirmities. He preferred being reproved as profligate, rather than being considered past the period when profligacy would be venial.