CHAPTER IX.
CAROLINE, HER TIMES AND CONTEMPORARIES.
Whiston patronised by Queen Caroline—His boldness and reproof of the Queen—Vanity of the poet Young punished—Dr. Potter, a high churchman—A benefice missed—Masquerades denounced by the clergy—Anger of the Court—Warburton, a favourite of the Queen—Butler’s ‘Analogy,’ her ordinary companion—Rise of Secker—The Queen’s regard for Dr. Berkeley—Her fondness for witnessing intellectual struggles between Clarke and Leibnitz—Character of Queen Caroline by Lord Chesterfield—The King encouraged in his wickedness by the Queen—General grossness of manners—The King managed by the Queen—Feeling exhibited by the King on sight of her portrait—The Duchess of Brunswick’s daughters—Standard of morality low—Ridicule of Marlborough by Peterborough—Morality of General Cadogan—Anecdote of General Webb—Lord Cobham—Dishonourable conduct of Lord Stair—General Hawley and his singular will—Disgraceful state of the prisons, and cruelty to prisoners—Roads bad and ill-lighted—Brutal punishment—Insolent treatment of a British naval officer by the Sultan—Brutality of a mob—Encroachment on Hyde Park by Queen Caroline—Ambitious projects of Princess Anne—Eulogy on the Queen—The children of King George and Queen Caroline—Verses on the Queen’s death.
Much has been said, and many opposite conclusions drawn, as to the religious character of Caroline. In our days, such a woman would not be allowed to wear the reputation of being religious. In her days, she may with more justice have been considered so. And yet she was far below a standard of much elevation. When we hear her boasting—or rather asserting, as convinced of the fact—that ‘she had made it the business of her life to discharge her duty to God and man in the best manner she was able,’ we have no very favourable picture of her humility; though at the same time we may acquit her of hypocrisy.
Her patronage of the well-meaning but mischievous, the learned but unwise Whiston is quite sufficient to condemn her in the opinion of many people. Here was a man who had not yet, indeed, left the Church of England for the Baptist community, because the Athanasian creed was an offence to him, but he had pronounced Prince Eugène to be the man foretold in the Apocalypse as the destroyer of the Turkish Empire, had declared that the children of Joseph and Mary were the natural brothers and sisters of Christ, set up a heresy in his ‘Primitive Christianity Revived,’ made open profession of Arianism, boldly made religious prophecies which were falsified as soon as made, and, more innocently, translated ‘Josephus,’ and tried to discover the longitude. Caroline showed her admiration of heterodox Whiston by conferring on him a pension of fifty pounds a-year; and as she had a regard for the mad scholar, she paid him with her own hand, and had him as a frequent visitor at the palace. The King was more guarded in his patronage of Whiston, and one day said to him, as King, Queen, and preacher were walking together in Hampton Court Gardens, that his opinions against Athanasianism might certainly be true, but perhaps it would have been better if he had kept them to himself. Now Whiston was remarkable for his wit and his fearlessness, and looking straight in the face of the man who was King by right of the Reformation, and who was the temporal head of the Church and, ex-officio, Defender of the Faith, he said: ‘If Luther had followed such advice, I should like to know where your Majesty would have been at the present moment.’ ‘Well, Mr. Whiston,’ said Caroline, ‘you are, as I have heard it said you were, a very free speaker. Are you bold enough to tell me my faults?’ ‘Certainly,’ was Whiston’s reply. ‘There are many people who come every year from the country to London upon business. Their chief, loyal, and natural desire is to see their King and Queen. This desire they can nowhere so conveniently gratify as at the Chapel Royal. But what they see there does not edify them. They behold your Majesty talking, during nearly the whole time of service, with the King—and talking loudly. This scandalises them; they go into the country with false impressions, spread false reports, and effect no little mischief.’ The Queen pleaded that the King would talk to her, acknowledged that it was wrong, promised amendment, and asked what was the next fault he descried in her. ‘Nay, madam,’ said he, ‘it will be time enough to go to the second when your Majesty has corrected the first.’
What Caroline said of her consort was true enough. At chapel, the King, when not sleeping, would be talking. Dr. Young thought, by power of his preaching, to keep him awake; but the King, on finding that the new chaplain was not giving him what he loved, ‘a short, good sermon,’ soon began to exhibit signs of somnolency. Young exerted himself in vain; and when his Majesty at length broke forth with a snore, the poet-preacher felt his vanity so wounded that he burst into tears. Where Kings and Queens so behaved, no wonder that young ensigns flirted openly with maids of honour, and that Lady Wortley Montague should have reason to write to the Countess of Bute: ‘I confess I remember to have dressed for St. James’s Chapel with the same thoughts your daughters will have at the opera.’
It is not likely that Archbishop Potter was sent for by Caroline herself in her last illness, for she liked the prelate as little as Whiston himself did. But Potter, the first of scholars, in spite of the sneers of academical Parr, was, although a staunch Whig, and esteemed by Caroline and her consort for his sermon preached before them at their coronation, yet a very high churchman, one who put the throne infinitely below the altar, and thought kings very far indeed below priests. This last opinion, however, was very much modified when the haughty prelate, son of a Wakefield linendraper, had to petition for a favour. His practice, certainly, was not perfect, for he disinherited one son, who married a dowerless maiden out of pure love, and he left his fortune to the other, who was a profligate and squandered it.
But even Caroline could not but respect Potter for his jealousy with regard to the worthily supplying of church benefices. Just after the Queen had congratulated him on being elected to the highest position in the Church of England, Potter called on a clerical relative, to announce to him the intention of his kinsman to confer on him a valuable living. The archbishop unfortunately found his reverend cousin busily engaged at skittles, and the prelate came upon him just as the apostolic player was aiming at the centre pin, with the remark, ‘Now for a shy at the head of the Church!’ He missed his pin, and also lost his preferment. Neither of their Majesties, however, thought Potter justified in withholding a benefice on such slight grounds of offence. Neither George nor Caroline approved of clergymen of any rank inveighing against amusements. I may cite, as a case in point, the anger with which the King, in his heart, visited Gibson, Bishop of London, for denouncing masquerades, and for getting up an episcopal address to the throne, praying ‘for the entire abolition of such pernicious diversions.’ The son of Sophia Dorothea was especially fond of masquerades, and his indignation was great at hearing them denounced by Gibson. This boldness shut the latter out from all chance of succeeding to Canterbury. Caroline looked with some favour, however, on this zealous and upright prelate; and her minister, Walpole, did nothing to obstruct the exercise of his great ecclesiastical power. ‘Gibson is a pope!’ once exclaimed one of the low church courtiers of Caroline’s coterie. ‘True!’ was Walpole’s reply, ‘and a very good pope too!’
It must be confessed, nevertheless, that the church and religion were equally in a deplorable state just previous to the demise of Caroline. That ingenious and learned Northumbrian, Edward Grey, published anonymously, the year before the Queen’s death, a work upon ‘The Miserable and Distracted State of Religion in England upon the Downfall of the Church Established.’ A work, however, published the same year, and which much more interested the Queen, was Warburton’s famous ‘Alliance between Church and State.’ This book brought again into public notice its author, that William Warburton, the son of a Newark attorney, who himself had been lawyer and usher, had denounced Pope as an incapable poet, and had sunk into temporary oblivion in his Lincolnshire rectory at Brant Broughton. But his ‘Alliance between Church and State’ brought him to the notice of Queen Caroline, to whom his book and his name were introduced by Dr. Hare, the Bishop of Chichester. Caroline liked the book and desired to see the author; but her last fatal illness was upon her before he could be introduced, and Warburton had to write many books and wait many years before he found a patron in Murray (Lord Mansfield) who could help him to preferment.
Queen Caroline made of Butler’s ‘Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature’ a sort of light-reading book, which was the ordinary companion of her breakfast-table. Caroline may have liked to dip into such profound fountains; but I doubt whether she often looked into the ‘Analogy,’ as it was not published till 1736, when her malady was increasing, and her power to study a work so abstruse must have been much diminished. Still she admired the learned divine, who was the son of a Wantage shopkeeper, and who was originally a Presbyterian Dissenter—a community for which German Protestant princes and princesses have always entertained a considerable regard. Caroline did not merely admire Butler because high churchmen looked upon him, even after his ordination, as half a dissenter; she had admired his Rolls Sermons, and when Secker, another ex-Presbyterian whom Butler had induced to enter the church, introduced and recommended him to Queen Caroline, she immediately appointed him clerk of the closet. It could have been very little before this, that Secker himself—who had been a Presbyterian, a doctor, a sort of sentimental vagabond on the Continent, and a free-thinker to boot—had been, after due probation and regular progress, appointed rector of St. James’s. Walpole declares that Secker owed this preferment to the favour of the Queen, and Secker’s biographers cannot prove much to the contrary. At the period of Caroline’s death he was Bishop of Bristol, and that high dignity he is also said to have owed to the friendship of Caroline. I wish it were only as true, that when the Prince of Wales was at enmity with the King and Queen, and used to attend St. James’s Church, his place of residence being at Norfolk House, in the adjacent square—I wish, I say, it were true that Secker once preached to the prince on the text, ‘Honour thy father and mother.’ The tale, however, is apocryphal; but it is true that the prince himself, at the period of the family quarrel, was startled, on entering the church, at hearing Mr. Bonny, the clerk in orders, rather pointedly beginning the service with, ‘I will arise, and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned,’ &c.
But, perhaps, of all the members of the church, Caroline felt regard for none more than for Berkeley. He had been an active divine long, indeed, before the Queen visited him with her favour. His progress had been checked by his sermons in favour of passive obedience and non-resistance—sermons which were considered not so much inculcating loyalty to Brunswick as denouncing the revolution which opened to that house the way to the throne. Berkeley had also incurred no little public wrath by destroying the letters which Swift’s Vanessa had bequeathed to his care, with a sum of money for the express purpose of their being published. But, on the other hand, he had manifested in various ways the true spirit of a Christian and a philosopher, and had earned immortal honour by his noble attempt to convert the American savages to Christianity. But it was his ‘Minute Philosopher’—his celebrated work, the object of which was to refute scepticism, that gained for him the distinction of the approval of Caroline. The expression of such approval is warrant for the Queen’s sincerity in the cause of true religion. So delighted was the Queen with this work, that she procured for its author his nomination to the Bishopric of Cloyne. Never was reward more nobly earned, more worthily bestowed, or more gracefully conferred. It did honour alike to the Queen and to Berkeley; and it raised the hopes of those who were ready to almost despair of Christianity itself, when they saw that Religion yet had its great champions to uphold her cause, and that, however indifferent the King might be to the merits of such champions, the Queen herself was ever eager to acknowledge their services and to recompense them largely as they merited.