On Thursday, the 15th of November 1757, Sir Robert Walpole wrote as follows to his brother Horace: ‘The Queen was taken ill last Wednesday.... It was explicitly declared and universally believed to be gout in the stomach.... The case was thought so desperate that Sir Hans Sloane and Dr. Hulse were on Friday sent for, who totally despaired. Necessity at last discovered and revealed a secret which had been totally concealed and unknown. The Queen had a rupture which is now known not to have been a new accident.... But will it ever be believed that a life of this importance should be lost, or run thus near, by concealing human infirmities?’
To these accounts of the Queen’s illness it may be added that Nichols, in his ‘Reminiscences,’ says that Dr. Sands suggested that a cure might be effected by injecting warm water, and that Dr. Hulse approved of the remedy and method. It was applied, with no one present but the medical men just named; and though it signally failed, they pronounced it as having succeeded. Their terror was great; and when they passed through the outer apartments, where the Duke of Newcastle congratulatingly hugged Hulse, on his having saved the Queen’s life, the doctor struggled with all his might to get away, lest he should be questioned upon a matter which involved, perhaps, more serious consequences than he could, in his bewilderment, then accurately calculate.
The Princess Caroline, as soon as the Queen had apparently passed away, put a looking-glass to her lips, and finding it unsullied by any breath, calmly remarked, ‘’Tis over!’ and thenceforward ceased to weep as she had done while her mother was dying. The King kissed the face and hands of his departed consort with unaffected fervour. His conduct continued to be as singular as ever. He was superstitious and afraid of ghosts; and it was remarked on this occasion, that he would have people with him in his bedroom, as if their presence could have saved him from the visitation of a spirit. In private, the sole subject of his conversation was ‘Caroline.’ He loved to narrate the whole history of her early life and his own: their wooing and their wedding, their joys and vexations. In these conversations he introduced something about every person with whom he had ever been in anything like close connection. It was observed, however, that he never once mentioned the name of his mother, Sophia Dorothea, or in any way alluded to her. He purposely avoided the subject; but he frequently named the father of Sophia, the Duke of Zell, who, he said, was so desirous of seeing his grandson grow up into an upright man, that the duke declared he would shoot him if George Augustus should prove a dishonest one!
Amid all these anecdotes, and tales, and reminiscences, and praises, there was a constant flow of tears shed for her who was gone. They seemed, however, to come and go at pleasure; for in the very height of his mourning and depth of his sorrow, he happened to see Horace, the brother of Sir Robert Walpole, who was weeping for fashion’s sake, but in so grotesque a manner, that when the King beheld it, he ceased to cry, and burst into a roar of laughter.
Lord Hervey foretold that his grief would not be of a lasting quality; and, in some degree, he was correct. It must be confessed, however, that the King never ceased to respect the memory of his wife. Walpole only thought of how George might be ruled now that the Queen was gone, and he speedily fixed upon a plan. He had been accustomed, he said, to side with the mother against the mistress. He would now, he added, side with the mistress against the children. He it was, who proposed that Madame Walmoden should now be brought to England; and, in a revoltingly coarse observation to the Princess Caroline, he recommended her, if she would have any influence with her father, to surround him with women, and govern him through them!
But other parties had been on the watch to lay hold of the power which had now fallen from the hand of the dead Caroline.
The dissension in the royal family, which was caused by the conduct of the Prince of Wales at the period of the birth of his eldest daughter, Augusta, was, of course, turned to political account. It was made even of more account in that way when the condition of Caroline became known. Lord Chesterfield, writing to Mr. Lyttelton from Bath, on the 12th of November 1737, says: ‘As I suppose the Queen will be dead or out of danger before you receive this, my advice to his royal highness (of Wales) will come full late; but in all events it is my opinion he cannot take too many and too respectful measures towards the Queen, if alive, and towards the King, if she is dead; but then that respect should be absolutely personal, and care should be taken that the ministers shall not have the least share of it.’
At the time when Caroline’s indignation had been aroused by the course adopted by the prince, when his wife was brought from Hampton Court to St. James’s for her confinement, his royal highness had made a statement to Sir Robert Walpole and Lord Harrington, which they were subsequently required to put down in writing as corroborative evidence of what the prince had said to the Queen. In reference to the inditers of these ‘minutes of conversation,’ Lord Chesterfield advises that the disrespect which he recommends the prince to exhibit towards the ministry shall be more marked ‘if in the course of these transactions the two evidences should be sent to, or of themselves presume to approach the prince; in which case (says the writer) he ought to show them personal resentment; and if they bring any message from the King or Queen which he cannot refuse receiving, he should ask for it in writing, and give his answer in writing; alleging publicly for his reason, that he cannot venture anything with people who have grossly both betrayed and misrepresented private conversation.’[42]
Through the anticipated natural death of the Queen, the opposition hoped to effect the political death of Walpole. ‘In case the Queen dies,’ writes Chesterfield, ‘I think Walpole should be looked upon as gone too, whether he be really so or no, which will be the most likely way to weaken him; for if he be supposed to inherit the Queen’s power over the King it will in some degree give it him; and if the opposition are wise, instead of treating with him, they should attack him most vigorously and personally, as a person who has lost his chief support. Which is indeed true; for though he may have more power with the King than any other body, yet he will never have that kind of power which he had by her means; and he will not even dare to mention many things to the King which he could without difficulty have brought about by her means. Pray present my most humble duty to his royal highness,’ concludes the writer, ‘and tell him that upon principles of personal duty and respect to the King and Queen (if alive), he cannot go too far; as, on the other hand, with relation to the ministers, after what has passed he cannot carry his dignity too high.’ The same strain is continued in a second letter, wherein it is stated with respect to the anticipated death of the Queen: ‘It is most certain that Sir Robert must be in the utmost distress, and can never hope to govern the King as the Queen governed him;’ and he adds, in a postscript: ‘We have a prospect of the Claude Lorraine kind before us, while Sir Robert’s has all the horrors of Salvator Rosa. If the prince would play the rising sun, he would gild it finely; if not, he will be under a cloud, which he will never be able hereafter to shine through.’ Finally, exclaims the eager writer: ‘Instil this into the Woman’—meaning by the latter the Prince of Wales’s ‘favourite,’ Lady Archibald Hamilton, who ‘had filled,’ says Lord Mahon, ‘the whole of his little court with her kindred.’ According to Horace Walpole, ‘whenever Sir William Stanhope met anybody at Carlton House whom he did not know, he always said, “your humble servant, Mr. or Mrs. Hamilton.”’
A fortnight after Chesterfield contemptuously calls Lady Archibald ‘the Woman,’ he begins to see the possibility of her rising to the possession of political influence, and he says to Mr. Lyttelton: ‘Pray, when you see Lady Archibald, assure her of my respects, and tell her that I would trouble her with a letter myself, to have acknowledged her goodness to me, if I could have expressed those acknowledgments to my own satisfaction; but not being able to do that, I only desire she would be persuaded that my sentiments with regard to her are what they ought to be.’[43] In such wise did great men counsel and intrigue for the sake of a little pre-eminence, which never yet purchased or brought with it the boon of happiness.